Avistar, IBM to Provide Bandwidth Management for Unified Communications
Avistar to Exhibit at Interop New York , Sept. 15-19 at Booth #1143
San Mateo , Calif. – September 16, 2008 – Avistar Communications Corporation (Nasdaq: AVSR), today announced that it will be working with IBM to provide bandwidth management for unified communications and collaboration solutions. As part of this work, Avistar’s C3’s dynamic bandwidth management technology is being licensed by IBM.
The goal of this relationship is to help customers take full advantage of their unified communications capabilities – including videoconferencing -- without experiencing degradation of service or investing in network upgrades or additional overhead.
“Many industry vendors claim VoIP and desktop videoconferencing capabilities, but the reality is that they are unable to deliver rich media at scale without significant network upgrades,” said Simon Moss, CEO, Avistar.
Moss added, “This relationship with IBM is another significant milestone in Avistar’s efforts to power important unified communications software in the industry through the creative deployment of patented technology.”
Videoconferencing is a dynamic area of the unified communications (UC) market, which is estimated by Wainhouse Research to reach $30-40 billion by 2011 . Unified communications is the integration of instant messaging (IM), videoconferencing, web conferencing, telephony, email, business applications and voice into one user-friendly experience.
The cornerstone of IBM’s unified communications strategy is IBM Lotus Sametime, an award-winning and market-leading platform that offers integrated, enterprise unified communications tools such as IM, VoIP, video chats and web conferencing.
“We are impressed with how Avistar’s dynamic bandwidth technology helps ensure optimum network quality and integrates well with other applications,” said Bruce Morse, vice president of unified communications and collaboration, IBM Lotus. “Working together, we hope to solve some of the toughest bandwidth management challenges plaguing the industry, helping our customers become more efficient and productive in their communications.”
“Avistar’s partnership with IBM Lotus and Sametime represents a win for both companies,” said Ira Weinstein, senior analyst and partner, Wainhouse Research. “The integration of Avistar’s bandwidth management technology into future IBM Lotus unified communications offerings paves the way for large scale visual collaboration by allowing rich media traffic and standard data traffic to safely share the same production network.”
Patent protected dynamic bandwidth management is a key feature of Avistar’s award-winning C3 videoconferencing technology. It is a collection of integrated dynamic software mechanisms and algorithms that control and manage bandwidth used by unified communications and distributed applications. The technology makes intelligent and automatic adjustments to support connections with external VoIP services, video within web-based instant messaging clients, room-based videoconferencing systems and high-end high-definition telepresence environments. These session-management tasks help to optimize the quality of experience, without compromising performance, impacting other applications or requiring expensive network upgrades and overhead.