RadiSys Solutions Speak to Key Trends at TeleSpan Future of Conferencing Workshop

This year’s conference had a number of dynamic themes: video, social networking, the pervasive deployment of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), and new companies that have entered the conferencing and collaboration services market including Skype and Microsoft.

Underlying theme at the conference

An underlying theme at the conference was the current trends that are rapidly transforming the industry, and how they will affect conferencing service providers overall. Companies that have just entered the conferencing industry are delivering new, differentiated services directly to consumers. These new service delivery platforms are providing a totally new means of communication and collaboration.

An interesting point noted while the lectures was that as the then and there generation enters into the workforce, they will continue the push away from email, and instead rely heavily on tools like Skype and text messaging. "As AOL Instant messenger started in the consumer realm and led IM in business, the same has as well started becoming true for Skype and social networking. People are collaborating in their personal lives using Skype, IM, Facebook and text messaging, and users entering the workforce expect to use these same tools in their work," Balasco commented.

The last year

Many social networking sites have demonstrated immense growth in their global users in the last year. Increase of growth for Facebook.com is about 153 percent when compared to 2007, with over 132 billion users. Social networking is being used regularly by millions of people to stay in contact with multiple people in their lives. Because of the vast growth of social networking sites, corporations and businesses are as well realizing the role of social networking when looking at ways to expand their customer relations. Could a videoconferencing tool be the at once widget on Facebook users’ profile?

"Over the past 10 to 15 years, the industry shifted from operator assisted to reservationless conferencing, giving users the ability to set up their own conference at anytime," said Balasco. In situations where a face–to–face group meeting just can’t happen because of separate locations, audio and videoconferencing services offer a cost-effective, reliable alternative for global business leaders to share and collaborate on ideas, as so then as conduct business from wherever they are.

Relevant topic at this year’s conference

"User experience remained a relevant topic at this year’s conference, and it is crucial that the industry continue to make services less complex. Many web communications tools are easy to install, easy to use and provide for easy communication—in doing so helping to increase the amount of consistent users. There are many ways providers can innovate; continually striving to make the conferencing user experience better with increased ease-of-access is one of those key areas of research," Balasco remarked.

RadiSys works in conjunction with service providers to offer solutions that support service differentiation and allow for the customization of user experiences during remaining cost effective, especially in the transition to all VoIP.

Pure IP implementation

Based upon a pure IP implementation, RadiSys integrated conferencing solutions can be gladly deployed network-wide for subscriber PSTN access through a SIP-enabled media gateway, or connected to subscriber SIP/VoIP endpoints directly via a session border controller and SIP trunks. SIPware reservationless conferencing offers service providers an off-the-shelf solution for delivering profitable conferencing services at a rapid pace, during continuing to reduce costs.

Recently, RadiSys announced the availability of the Integrated Mobile Media Server, a packet-based delivery system for 3G mobile video services and 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution, latest standard in the mobile network technology) deployments. Ray Adensamer, the senior product marketing manager at RadiSys, answers questions about the IMMS, and discusses how it can help boost a service provider's ability to generate new earnings...

Multimedia conferencing, audio/video ringback tones, hosted VoIP communications, unified messaging and other services all share the need for IP audio and video media packet processing...