HP Pitches Video Collaboration Into Competitive Market

Hewlett-Packard is rolling out a host of video collaboration technologies in the middle of a week that has seen more than its share of communications announcements from top-tier vendors.

HP has announced software products that will enable enterprises to bring high-definition (HD) video communications anywhere. It will allow businesses that are used to the high-quality immersive experience of HP’s Halo telepresence products to get a similar effect on their desktops or other devices, according to Darren Podrabsky, marketing manager for HP’s Visual Collaboration business.

“We’re delivering it to conference rooms and desktops everywhere,” Podrabsky said in an interview with eWEEK. “What we have heard from customers is they that they love this immersive experience but they want it where ever they are.”

Lower Bandwidth For HD Video

Key to HP’s ability to bring HD video communications to a greater number of endpoints while driving down bandwidth demand through its partnership with Vidyo, announced in June, that lets HP leverage scalable video coding (SVC) technology from Vidyo. The SVC codec improves the user experience and reduces latency while eliminating the need for an expensive multipoint control unit (MCU), according to HP.

New desktop offerings include the Visual Collaboration Desktop, a software client that can be used on any PC or notebook, and the Visual Collaboration Executive Desktop, a touchscreen solution that includes a TouchSmart Quad bundled with Visual Collaboration software and comes with a camera and headset.

In addition, HP unveiled the Visual Collaboration Room 100 and Room 220 that integrate high-quality video into multipurpose conference rooms. Next year, HP will release technology that links its immersive Halo studios with the dekstop and conference room offerings to create a highly integrated communications infrastructure, officials said.

HP also announced the x86-based infrastructure that enables enterprises to run the communications products, including the Visual Collaboration Portal, on systems such as its ProLiant DL360 server. The environment lets IT staff manage such tasks as remote configuration, authentication and licensing.

HP’s Visual Collaboration Router, also built on the company’s ProLiant servers, offers distributed media routing and the Visual Collaboration Gateway, which supports both H.323 and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standards, lets businesses continue to use existing legacy videoconferencing products in the SVC environment.

Podrabsky said the new products, which are available immediately, are aimed at enterprises and are expected to find traction in such industries as oil and gas exploration, financial services, pharmeceuticals, wireless and telecommunications, and software development.

Growing Interest

The communications space is getting a lot of attention from a growing number of IT vendors, as enterprises look for ways to reduce costs, especially travel expenses, while increasing worker productivity. In addtion, the workforce is getting significantly more mobile, driving the demand for communications infrastructures that can reach anywhere. Forrester Research is expecting the unified communications (UC) space to grow to $14.5 billion by 2015.

This is prompting a lot of activity in the market. Kicking off its Collaboration 2010 Summit, Cisco Systems introduced its efforts to integrate its visual communications technologies with a desktop virtualisation effort. At the same time, Cisco officials announced that they were video-enabling all of their endpoints and rolling out new TelePresence offerings.

Microsoft is also pitching in and has taken the wraps off Lync 2010, the latest iteration of its Office communications software suite. Along the way, a number of other vendors, including telepresence vendor Polycom, announced support for Microsoft’s offering.

Smaller vendors are also working to gain traction with Mitel introducing its Freedom architecture , a cloud-based infrastructure designed to bring an array of communications capabilities to enterprises, supporting offerings such as Mitel AnyWhere, desktop virtualisation integration with VMware View, and expanded UC support for Google Android, Research In Motion and Apple devices.