News in Brief: 17 February, 2016

February 17, 2016 Source

Stock-Head-sized_16Yes, ISE is going on this week. More news will be forthcoming, but here’s some of what’s been announced thus far, as well as other recent news.

InFocus announced the acquisition of Avistar, a video conferencing software provider with a long rich history, not long after its acquisition of wall display / data visualization vendor Jupiter Systems. The goal is in their words to “add software depth and proven technology to the InFocus mission of providing best-in-class end-to-end solutions that enable people to connect, collaborate, and teach across the table and across the globe.” The acquisition enables InFocus to offer video conferencing in some new ways; Avistar technology is already deployed in the all-in-one Mondopad video conferencing system as well as the various calling services, such as ConX, provided by InFocus. At ISE the company is showing off its ConX multi-device platform, which offers several enterprise-ready solutions, including the new ConX Wall and ConX Exec systems. Both are video conferencing solutions that feature multi-endpoint video conferencing and content sharing, configurable for a range of applications. Using multiple ultra-narrow-bezel HD displays, users can customize ConX solutions for any wall size, ranging from a single display to a large video wall. Also available: an integrated video conferencing multipoint control unit (MCU) server. The server enables users to instantly configure and change each input image to any number of the displays. This allows in-room participants to focus on whatever content they want at any given time, such as a data or video stream from a remote participant.

News in Brief: 17 February, 2016 1

InFocus ConX
Sonic Foundry also is at ISE this week, coming off of a nice earnings call last week. Billing growth exceeded their estimates ($8.6M), non-North America revenues grew 55% year over year based on sales into China and Japan and a new management team in Japan, and lots of higher education customers going with Mediasite Cloud. The company’s $8.6M in billings were up 12% yoy, with $3.9M in product, $2.0M in support, and $2.7M in its event and hosting services. Revenues of $9.1 million was up 4% over $8.7 million yoy. Education revenues comprised 54% of its revenues. What appeared to be significant: a more upbeat “we’re closing the deals we’d been pushing out based on international conditions and delays.”

Last week VBrick announced new features in its Rev Enterprise Video Cloud that bring new self-publishing and Cisco Spark collaboration capabilities to video-focused organizations. The Rev Enterprise Video Cloud enables organizations to rapidly deliver video without incurring infrastructure costs, staffing requirements, and system downtime required to deploy and maintain traditional server-based, on premise products. New services offered in the Rev Enterprise Video Cloud include 1) Rev Create, a new desktop rich media publishing application (read that as user-generated content) that gives organizations power to unleash knowledge transfer; with Rev Create, knowledge workers and experts can use video from webcams and screen capture to create rich media presentations that can be edited and uploaded to the Rev cloud; and 2) Cisco Spark integration, whereby users of Cisco’s Spark collaboration platform can now easily share newly published Rev videos with other Spark users via a new integration between Spark and Rev. (Users in Spark persistent rooms can subscribe to relevant Rev video categories, and receive and share alerts about new Rev videos within Spark rooms.)

Wowza Media Systems this week released a software development kit that enables the development of end-to-end mobile live video applications on the Wowza platform. Called Wowza GoCoder SDK, the new release supports the creation of live broadcasts directly from iOS and Android phones by enabling direct integration with Wowza Streaming Engine servers and the company’s hosted Wowza Streaming Cloud service.

StarLeaf isn’t just hiring (see below). The company launched StarLeaf Encore, a cloud recording service, available to existing and new customers that need to record, save, and share conferences. StarLeaf Encore is available on a license basis, and once Encore is activated for a customer, all meeting hosts can select ‘record’ when scheduling a meeting. Recordings are secure and only accessible to meeting hosts, who can download and share them with others. The service is available to all StarLeaf customers, not only to those with StarLeaf clients and endpoints but also to those who have Cisco, Polycom, or Lifesize endpoints registered to the StarLeaf Cloud.

Oslo-based Videxio has announced a series of new partner-branded software applications including the extension of the My Meeting Video client to Android and iOS tablets and introduction of browser plug-ins enabling support for Internet Explorer and Safari. The new clients and browser plug-ins are being shown at ISE and will be commercially available this month. This was announced a bit after Videxio also announced that its users can now integrate their Virtual Meeting Room (VMR) experience with the audioconferencing services of Intercall, Level3, Level3+WebEx, Arkadin, GlobalMeet and AT&T. The announcement augments the existing audio functionality that already allowed participants to dial-in and join meetings over a local audio dial-in number in over 50 countries. It also provides a supplement to the My Meeting Audio App, which enables users to join their video meetings on audio with the push of a single button directly from their smartphones.

In other news from that news capitol on the North Sea, Oslo-based Pexip has announced the addition of Dynamic Hybrid Cloud to the Pexip Infinity platform. This allows an on-premises installation of Pexip Infinity to burst to an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud when on-premise capacity is about to be exceeded. Now, customers no longer need to worry about running out of resources. We expect to keep hearing more and more about IaaS and that wonderful ability to “burst” forth into excess capacity.

Shhh! Acano is now fully part of Cisco as well, as of Friday, 29th of January. And the rotation of talent in and out of and back into Cisco continues.

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The ever-evolving, full-of-velocity Vaddio, a provider of conferencing and broadcast audio visual solutions, announced the Vaddio Precision Camera Controller Premier (PCC Premier), its newest addition to its camera controller consoles that adds anywhere, anytime control. The PCC Premier enables simultaneous control of up to 16 Vaddio RoboSHOT PTZ cameras over an IP network connection. An IP address book can virtually control up to 80 PTZ cameras with the press of a single button. In addition to Vaddio’s PTZ camera, the PCC Premier can control both Sony and Panasonic cameras via its eight RS-232 connection ports – how’s that for flexible (and taking it to your competitors!). Vaddio has also included support for a built-in H.264 decoder, which helps it target remote studio and campus operating center applications. Paired with Vaddio RoboSHOT HD-SDI, RoboSHOT 12 USB, or ClearSHOT 10 USB, camera operators will have ability to remotely view and control live production events over a network.

This industry makes for interesting bedfellows – alliances that sometimes make you say “HUH?” at first – until you stop and think about what’s going on. FreeConferenceCall.com has partnered with Phoenix Audio Technologies, a designer and manufacturer of audio and video conferencing conference room solutions, to deliver end-to-end business communications solutions to enterprise customers. FreeConferenceCall.com for Business appears to be a channel partnership play – co-marketing – of the offerings from each company.

Speaking of strange bedfellows, there are the other type: those who get married.

CallTower and SoundConnect, both providers of cloud-based, enterprise-class unified communications and collaboration solutions, announced an agreement for SoundConnect to merge with CallTower. Together, the two organizations have successfully implemented more than 70,000 customer licenses across the globe over the past decade. The merger of the two organizations will be completed by the end of the first quarter 2016. During this time SoundConnect will be renamed to CallTower. There are no expected staff changes (yay, said the staff!) and the forecasted 2016 new hire count is expected to grow. A complete product offering for the combined organizations is available.

TrueConf is showing at ISE 2016 a live, single-stream, 1-on-1 video call at 2160p resolution. This exhibit is reportedly facilitated by the TrueConf Server hybrid Unified Communications platform and the brand new Panasonic AW-UE70 4K PTZ camera. TrueConf is also demonstrating web conferencing and streaming video modules, as well as new TrueConf Federation feature, which allows users to create flexible enterprise communications platforms across multiple instances of TrueConf Server.

PanTerra, a provider of unified cloud services for mid-market enterprises, announced a master distribution agreement with Bridgepointe Technologies of San Mateo, CA. The relationship will bring PanTerra’s CloudUC, SmartBox, and SentraCloud services into Bridgepointe’s cloud and communications portfolio.

ClearOne, global provider of audio and visual communications solutions, has selected BP Marketing Group, LLC of Minnesota as its Midwest manufacturer’s sales representative firm for its Network Media Streaming products. BP Marketing will continue sales representation of ClearOne Wireless Microphone Systems as well.

Published on 17 February 2016 by Wainhouse Research
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