Avistar (News - Alert) Communications Corp. announced today that it will be working with IBM to provide bandwidth management for unified communications (UC) and collaboration solutions through its “Avistar C3 (News - Alert) technology.”

 

The goal of this relationship is to help customers take full advantage of their UC 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. “This relationship with IBM (News - Alert) is another significant milestone in Avistar’s efforts to power important unified communications software in the industry through the creative deployment of patented technology.”

 

Avistar’s technology provides the critical element in unified communications – bringing people in organizations face-to-face. Its latest product, Avistar C3, delivers a single-click desktop videoconferencing and collaboration experience.

 

Available as a stand-alone or integrated with existing UC software, Avistar C3 provides users instant messaging-style ability to initiate video communications across and outside of a business. Dynamic bandwidth management enables thousands of users to access desktop videoconferencing, VoIP and streaming media, without requiring substantial new network investment or impairing network performance.

 

Videoconferencing is a dynamic area of the UC market, which is estimated by Wainhouse Research to reach $30-40 billion by 2011. UC 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 UC strategy is IBM Lotus Sametime, a platform that offers integrated, enterprise UC 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 UC 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.”

 

Ira Weinstein, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research, said Avistar’s partnership with IBM Lotus and Sametime represents a win for both companies. “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,” he said.

 

Avistar’s C3 makes automatic adjustments to support connections with external VoIP services, video within web-based IM clients, room-based videoconferencing systems and 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.

 

Avistar’s desktop videoconferencing and collaboration installations include more than 18,000 seats sold in more than 40 countries. Clients report as much as a 20 percent reduction in travel expense and carbon emissions, increases in productivity and immeasurably improved relationship building within their organizations, as well as with suppliers and customers. For more information, visit http://www.avistar.com.