By Richard Martin

Aiming at erasing the boundaries between proprietary telepresence systems, RADVISION on June 2 brought out what it calls the most interoperable, multi-vendor, multi-stream telepresence conferencing solution in the market. Bridging telepresence systems from the major vendors including Cisco, Polycom, TANDBERG, and LifeSize, the Scopia Elite MCU (multipoint control unit) attempts to overcome the interoperability issues that continue to plague the growing telepresence market.

The videoconferencing industry worked for years to provide interoperability between endpoints and MCUs, Bob Romano, vice president of enterprise marketing at RADVISION, told VON/xchange. That worked well to promote interoperability. But then telepresence came along from Cisco.

The new room-sized, fully immersive conferencing systems from Cisco, priced in the tens of thousands of dollars, brought a new level of visibility and sophistication to the videconferencing market. But they did not use standard codecs, and the fact that Cisco Telepresence is a three-stream system made it more complicated to mix the media streams together outside the proprietary Cisco environment.

The problem was exacerbated when Cisco said last year it was acquiring TANDBERG, giving the networking giant a dominant market share in videoconferencing, including around three-quarters of the emerging telepresence market. While Cisco has taken some steps toward interoperability, promising in April to make open the software protocols for its Telepresence products, the basic problem remains.

Since then, companies like Polycom and RADVISION which until recently focused on supplying components for videoconferencing systems to OEMs have been scrambling to devise a strategy to promote interoperability with the Cisco lines and to carve out a sustainable niche in the market.

In March, Polycom said it would extend its partnership with Avaya across its full voice portfolio, to co-develop and market unified communications systems that comprise Avayas SIP-based Aura platform and Polycoms Open Collaboration Network architecture.

Its a good time to be Polycom, asserted Mark Roberts, Polycom vice president for partner marketing, listing a series of announcements of partnerships with companies including IBM, Juniper Networks Inc., Siemens Enterprise Communications, and BroadSoft. Polycom, and now RADVISION, hope to capitalize on the pricey, proprietary nature of Ciscos telepresence systems to spread the technology across a broader swath of businesses and to push for an open-standards approach to video-enabled unified communications.

The new MCU provides a single-screen system that combines three-screen telepresence images into a single composite image with strips comprising all the participants. RADVISIONs MCU includes logic to all the different systems to interoperate with a standard room videoconferencing system.

Its really needed in the industry, added Romano. The concept of telepresence, with this immersive environment, is great, but the lack of interoperability is something that has slowed down wide adoption. This is something that will move the market forward.

For all the hype that Cisco has poured into telepresence, it still represents a fraction of the overall videoconferencing market. Around 60,000 videoconferencing units are shipped per quarter, Romano estimated, and of those, full telepresence systems number in the hundreds.

The fundamental basis of Polycoms post Cisco-TANDBERG strategy, said Roberts, is to look at these large scale deployments, and give our customers options instead of being beholden to one partic company. That, in turn, allows flexibility and innovation to develop we havent yet thought out. Rather than specify a user case the manufacturer thinks is the way it should all work, we wanted to do so in much more free-flowing, organic way.

RADVISION wants the same thing. Now the question is whether a group of smaller, interoperable rivals can compete against the Cisco monolith.