It was inevitable.
Really, it was. Everyone else has decided that
voice over IP (VoIP) (define
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news -
alert - tutorial)
was the wave of the future, and the conferencing market is no exception.
Genesys Conferencing, a company with over 1,000 employees and having
delivered 1.3 billion conferencing minutes in 2003, decided to take the
VoIP plunge.
By deploying Convedia�s
CMS-600 media server Genesys has been able to combine conferencing units
to reduce cost and thus improve profitability. In addition to the
savings, they are able to provide "reservationless" events and
videoconferencing features. It is important to note that both VoIP
devices and legacy PSTN devices are supported. According to the COO of
Genesys Conferencing, Jim Huzell, the scalability of their VoIP-based
backbone is theoretically infinite.
VoIP usually provides
benefits far beyond cost-savings and the conferencing market is just one
arena where customers can feel this in action.
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Enhanced features
and integration with other applications such as ERP and CRM as well
as collaboration tools and portals.
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Support for a
variety of endpoints from smart phones to PDAs and PCs.
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Integration into
messaging systems via presence. A side benefit is increasing the
ease in meeting planning and ad-hoc collaboration or as we call it
at TMC, business as usual.
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Customizable voice
prompts and commands.
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Scalability:
Tremendous flexibility in the number of simultaneous meetings.
This last point
shouldn�t be overlooked. VoIP allows tremendous flexibility in allowing
tremendous amounts of small conferences. This is something not possible
in the TDM world, as it is hardware based and prohibitively expansive.
In fact, Convedia is putting VoIP-powered conferencing to work by mixing
audio for online gaming, specifically Xbox Live. They allow voice chat,
customizable mixers, and the ability to have mute. VoIP-based
conferencing in gaming is one of the hottest areas of VoIP.
There seems to be no market that VoIP is not revolutionizing by lowering
costs, improving service and flexibility.
Rich Tehrani is
TMC's president and group editor-in-chief.
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