[December 02, 2014]

IMTC and UCI Forum Celebrate Merger With Major Telecommunications Multimedia Industry Event and Awards Ceremony

The International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) announces the successful completion of its yearly Telecommunications Multimedia and Unified Communications (UC) Industry Forum and Awards Ceremony.

The forum and member meeting was hosted by Microsoft (News - Alert) in Redmond, Wash., October 15-16, 2014, where IMTC members, non-members and guests heard from over 30 leading industry experts on the status of technologies used in video conferencing and UC communications products and services. These technology updates focused on H.265/HEVC, WebRTC, VP8/VP9, Cloud Services, Media Aware Network Element (MANE) and Software Defined Networking industry standards and explored current and future trends affecting video conferencing and unified communications.

The keynote address was given by Todd Haugen, General Manager of Microsoft Wi-Fi. Haugen's presentation discussed Wi-Fi and UC Software Defined Networks (SDN) initiatives that are evolving from the data center to edge applications. IMTC's UC SDN Activity Group is helping resolve complex QoS/QoE issues, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) shortcomings and poor call quality.

"IMTC and UCI Forum's merger has well positioned the new organization to define and create the communications technologies of tomorrow and to help ensure they are interoperable across multiple vendors and networks," said Haugen. "It was a great pleasure to host and participate in this first event of the new IMTC and our shared mission to help make today's communication technologies possible."

IMTC also presented its prestigious leadership award to Dr. Bernd Edler, International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, and Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg, Fraunhofer (News - Alert) Institute for Digital Media Technology, for their contributions to audio coding and its standardization. The 2014 leaership award recognizes the efforts and innovation in the development of the Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT), which became a key element in perceptual audio codecs created thereafter. Edler's main research area is audio coding, where he made significant contributions to several international standards including MPEG-1 Layer3 (mp3), MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), MPEG Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC). Brandenburg has been a driving force behind some of today´s most innovative digital audio technology, notably the MP3 and MPEG audio standards.

IMTC presented Markus Hanhisalo with a Service Award for his contribution to the IMTC as a board director and treasurer. IMTC also presented Service Awards to 13 long-standing UCI Forum board members and officers: Matt Collier, Jeffrey Rodman (News - Alert), Bernard Aboba, Alex Eleftheriadis, Manfred Arndt, Ori Modai, Casey King, Mary Barnes, Timothy O'Neil, Pascal Menezes, Brad Chalker, Linda Braun, and Yair Weiner. They all have provided outstanding service to the IMTC and UCI Forum and have been enthusiastic supporters of the respective organizations.

Anatoli Levine, president of the IMTC and Director of Product Management at Spirent (News - Alert) Communications, summarized this year's forum: "This was a grand way for IMTC and UCI Forum to celebrate its merger and showcase how critically important our combined efforts are to the evolving Unified Communications and multimedia technology industry. From the quality of speakers, presentations and discussions point of view, this forum was one of the best in IMTC's 21 year history."

Video replay of all the forum presentations is available at http://video.imtc.org/amm2014/.

The forum sponsors included Microsoft and LifeSize Communications with event management provided by Inventures.

About the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC)

The IMTC is an industry-leading, non-profit organization whose mission is to promote and facilitate the development and use of interoperable, real-time, multimedia telecommunication products and services based on open international standards. The IMTC hosts interoperability testing events and demonstrations throughout the world. IMTC has hosted numerous events to test IMS, VoLTE, SIP, H.323, 3G-324M, TIP, 3G PS Streaming, and other Voice over IP products and services with each other. The IMTC Board of Directors includes representatives from AT&T, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Ericsson (News - Alert), Fraunhofer, Hewlett Packard, Huawei, Intel, LifeSize Communications, Microsoft, Polycom, Qualcomm, Spirent Communications, Unify and Vidyo. Membership is open to any interested party, including vendors of audio, document, and video conferencing hardware and software; academic institutions; government agencies; and non-profit organizations. The IMTC is making "Rich Media happen Anywhere, Anytime." Further information can be found at http://www.imtc.org.

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