A Video Conferencing Professional’s Guide To Enterprise Connect 2015

Enterprise Connect will be information overload this year for enterprise video communications and collaboration professionals, so we pulled together the top five announcements and attractions just for you. Most unified communications solutions have video integrations now, so there are plenty of software and hardware goodies at EC15 to go around. Here are a few recommendations of what we “video people” can get stoked about this year.

VIDYO’S SMART GLASSES

You can’t go to Enterprise Connect and not demo some of the awesome new wearable technology that’s out there. The market for wearables is huge in 2015 (particularly smart glass) and continuing to scale up with even bigger opportunities for developers to create applications for hands-free technologies.

One thing that caught my attention was the announcement that Vidyo is bringing video collaboration to wearable tech. These glasses from Vidyo give the wearer hands free collaboration with a remote expert from anywhere, at anytime. This is huge for those of us in the video collaboration industry and end users alike.

Imagine some of the applications – in the oil and gas industry for example. The user puts on the smart glass at a job site and dials a remote expert technician for assistance. The glasses allow “see what i’m seeing” collaboration for efficient problem solving and assistance on site.

3If you’re attending #EC15 this year – definitely check out the new shades.

ACANO OPEN ANNOUNCEMENT

This is why we love Acano. CTO Mark Blake unveiled some new information about the Acano Open product in a press release recently:

“The ability to allow anyone using a browser to simply join a scheduled or unscheduled Lync meeting opens up a world of B2B and B2C applications.”

The new product allows Lync and non-Lync users to join scheduled meetings without any interruption of usual workflow.  Join a call, scheduled or unscheduled, with any device including SIP, H.323 and even WebRTC. According to the announcement we can look forward to plugin free browser access to Lync meetings, high-quality video and audio and content sharing.

You’ll want to stop by their booth to get more information, and maybe even some swag. If you keep up with the awards, these guys were finalists for “Best of Enterprise Connect” last year and this year as well.

JUPITER SYSTEMS’ CANVAS 3.0

Jupiter Systems’ new Canvas 3.0 software is a super intriguing addition to their awesome collaboration visualization platform. Some features to look forward to for collaboration junkies include:

• Shared voice chat – participants are automatically enrolled in a shared voice chat room to facilitate collaboration and teamwork.
• Microsoft Lync® integration – users can start a Lync conversation with Canvas or collaborate through the Lync client.

Remote users can dial into Canvas through SIP based conferencing systems without having Canvas at their location or share content and collaborate with non-Canvas users from any laptop using WebRTC technology.

The kind of interoperability we’re seeing here is crucial for today’s anytime anywhere communications.

PEXIP INFINITY

Speaking of interoperability Pexip’s award-winning Infinity meeting platform introduces features that enterprise video communication and collaboration professionals crave. Collaborate via Lync as well as traditional video and audio conferencing for a simple user experience with Pexip Infinity.

The software-based transcoding engine brings every video conferencing system you can think of, together in seamless unity. Share content and dial in from desktops, room systems, software clients, smartphones, tablets you name it. To put it frankly as Pexip says, “It just works.”

Be sure to cruise on by (and say hello to us) at the Pexip booth #2021

REAL TIME MONITORING FOR VIDEO

We’re in the business of interoperability as well. Since that seems to be the work of the day, here are some of the platforms that we provide analytics for:

If you’re managing a large video environment you’ll want to check out our historical and real time monitoring analytics solutions to optimize and streamline video IT productivity.

We just launched a Real Time Monitor product designed to give enterprise IT the following:

• Instant visibility into your network to see utilization and capacity peaks and trends over the last 24 hours.
• Alerts for monitoring your capacity, infrastructure status, and endpoint status, and discovering the source of problems in your network the moment they happen.
• Endpoint status and call quality for all managed endpoints in the network with information like addresses (for configuration), model, firmware, status, packet loss, jitter, latency, alias and more.

If you want to see it in action, come by Cisco booth #1205 or Pexip booth #2021 and we’ll demo it for you. Sign up for a free trial here or if you want to learn some best practices, download our brand new guide: