Cloud video conferencing heads for iPads

Beverley Head
Thursday, 23 June 2011 16:49

Business IT - Networking

Videoconferencing specialist Polycom is hopeful that Australians will be among the first to access cloud based unified communications services now under development following the release of the Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC) specification earlier this month. It has also slated October for the release of Android, iPhone and iPad apps to allow mobile videoconferencing.

Sudhakar Ramakrishna, global head of unified comms solutions and chief development officer at Polycom, said that with Telstra one of the first 14 service providers signed up to the OVCC which is intended to make videoconferencing services interoperable, he was hopeful that there would be trials in Australia in the third or fourth quarter of the year.

Mr Ramakrishna said the first commercial services were expected in the first half of next year, although he did not say where these might start.

He said that the OVCC based cloud based videoconferencing services would be network agnostic, although he believed that the advent of Australia's high speed NBN would 'just make it easier and better.' He said that unlike peer to peer video services, the OVCC initiative would offer users more secure services, and would also allow service providers to either market the cloud based videoconferencing service to end user enterprises, or to other service providers.

'My hope is that Australia will be among the first markets where this is offered,' said Mr Ramakrishna.

He said that in its simplest form the service could be provided to a single user after they had downloaded a client application and installed a camera. However he said for enterprise users which had their own telepresence facility, the OVCC initiative would make it simpler for enterprise-to-enterprise videoconferencing.

'We are deeply committed to the cloud and mobility solutions, said Mr Ramakrishna, referencing Gartner statistics which suggested that by 2012 40 per cent of unified communications services would be provided as cloud based services. He said Polycom apps for Android, Apple phones and iPads would start to become commercially available in October which would allow videoconferencing to be used on and between different mobile platforms.