The first phase of Sony's "Open Conferencing" initiative was announced today. Open Conferencing will offer enterprise customers the audio/video expertise of Sony's conferencing endpoints integrated with a complete, standards-based infrastructure and middleware architecture from Radvision. The companies stated that they expect the result to be an end-to-end solution that will span from meeting room to employee desktop, and support both existing and emerging technologies.
Sony will now offer a complete architecture for group and desktop conferencing solutions. Sony will now offer through its channels and on its price list Sony conferencing endpoint products and display devices configured with Radvision gateways, gatekeepers, multipoint conferencing units (MCU), network (QoS) management tools and other infrastructure and middleware solutions. Sony will also provide integrated, enhanced desktop communications tools such as soft video endpoints, instant messaging, one-click scheduling and other workflow applications.
As part of this movement towards standards-based communication, the core of the Open Conferencing initiative, Sony and Radvision have worked together over the past year to test and confirm that both Radvision's viaIP 400 Multimedia Communications Platform version 3.5, and Sony's PCS-1 and 11 videoconferencing endpoints support are interoperable under the recently ratified H.239 ITU-T standard.
H.239 enables data and web-enabled collaboration to work in parallel with a video session by opening multiple streams within a single video stream to each endpoint. This replaces dual video functionality currently on the market that requires every component in a network to support a proprietary implementation.
Radvision today also announced its plan to modify its iVIEW network management software to add new functionalities that will enable the remote management of all Sony endpoints within a conferencing network. The iVIEW software is expected to be available this fall at about the same time that Sony's new PCS-TL50 and PCS-G70 videoconferencing systems will hit the market.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on Wednesday, June 09, 2004