Special Focus

TMC Labs Innovation Awards UC 2012

This article originally appeared in the June 2012 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY

Unified communications continues to have rapid growth, both in technological improvements and deployments. The unification of voice, video, desktop sharing, instant messaging and other communications technologies improves employee productivity and lowers the total cost of ownership.

This year we had one company (JDSU) win two awards, which is very rare. JDSU offers a couple of innovative products that improve testing methodologies and give deeper insight into your network to troubleshoot VoIP, video, and cloud-based offerings, such as hosted UC. We also have a couple of innovative high-end video telepresence systems from ClearOne and LifeSize.

This year marks the 13th annual TMC (News - Alert) Labs Innovation Awards where we honor products and services that have unique and innovative features that often differentiate them from their competitors. For 2012 we have ten TMC Labs Innovation Awards winners. Here they are:

ADTRAN Inc.

NetVanta Unified Communications Solution Suite with Notification Server

www.adtran.com

ADTRAN’s NetVanta UC suite targets small, medium and large enterprises (2 to 2,000 employees), and includes features such as voice mail, unified messaging, fax server, auto attendant and communication-enabled business processes. ADTRAN espouses the platform’s extreme level of granular personalization and flexibility enabling each user to administer its own configuration and settings.

The NetVanta UC Solution Suite allows you to deploy the solution in virtual environments, which increasingly is becoming a requirement of IT management due to its ability to consolidate servers, conserve space and reduce costs. This also enables service providers and resellers to offer cloud-hosted solutions based on NetVanta UC. Virtualization also adds business continuity and disaster recovery.

ADTRAN recently added NetVanta UC Notification Server (UCNS), which is an automated notification application. It can pull data from a customer’s ODBC-compatible database or business process systems and deliver information by phone and/or e-mail. An example would be outbound calling for schools sending announcements that school is being postponed or cancelled due to inclement weather; reminders about clients’ appointments; or emergency notifications. Approved personnel can simply dial into the system, record a message, and send it to all or selected records within a given database.

One of the critical pieces of the UC suite is the NetVanta Unified Communications Server, which is a software application designed for Microsoft Windows platforms, can scale to more than 2,000 users per server. It is capable of supporting UC on one or more different types of PBXs from a variety of leading manufacturers. This server provides a core set of UC capabilities including unified messaging, fax server, auto-attendants, personal assistants, graphical drag-and-drop non-programmatic service creation, interactive voice response for inbound and outbound calling services, integration with ODBC databases, text to speech, one-number services, call redirection services, and notifications.

ClearOne

COLLABORATE

www.clearone.com

ClearOne is renowned for its superb audio conferencing devices with multiple microphones, distributed echo cancellation, and noise cancellation. What you may not be aware of is ClearOne’s foray into videoconferencing, with the launch of COLLABORATE, an all-in-one voice, video and data collaboration solution that launched in July 2011. ClearOne took its unique HDConference audio technology and integrated it into the COLLABORATE solution. One of the key features is distributed echo cancellation, which helps eliminate acoustical echo. The platform assigns an acoustical echo canceller to each microphone, so that the echo canceller identifies the sound that would otherwise be returned to the far end as echo and eliminates it.

ClearOne was the first to introduce distributed echo cancellation in 1998, and the company incorporates it into every audio conferencing system. Another key audio feature is First Microphone Priority. When multiple microphones are active simultaneously in an audio conference phone, voice signals arrive at different microphones at different times due to the reflection of the sound from walls, ceilings or other surfaces. This causes sound distortion, which participants typically describe as a hollow or tunnel sound. ClearOne’s First Microphone Priority technology minimizes this distortion by using an intelligent voice detection method to activate only one microphone at a time based on its proximity to the person speaking. One other interesting audio enhancement is ClearEffect, which creates natural, full-sounding audio by simulating the high and low tones that were eliminated by the most common narrow-band (64kbps) audio signal.

You can get the solution with one or two 46-inch LCD HD (wall-mountable) displays with an Integrated Quad core PC and ClearOne audio mixer, Windows 7 Ultimate Operating System, HD USB camera, Collaborate microphone, Collaborate Soundbar, wireless keyboard and mouse. This comprehensive plug-and-play audio and video package enables you to perform unified communications, presentations, web conferencing, audio/video conferencing, VoIP, and more. Since it runs on Windows 7, you can run popular UC clients, such as Microsoft Lync, Skype, Vidyo, ClearSea, and others.

ClearOne claims COLLABORATE costs 40 percent to 50 percent less than competitive solutions, which are not integrated and require the additional components. Due to this integration, the company claims to offer the smallest footprint available in a room conferencing system.

One other innovative feature is that when not in conferencing mode the optional VIEW Multimedia Viewer allows users to consume rich, high-definition multimedia content from anywhere on the enterprise network in the form of live media broadcasts, corporate presentations, on-demand videos, real-time dashboards, digital signage, etc. In the last six months, ClearOne has added a software-based videoconferencing codec, which has built-in SIP/H.323 interoperability, data sharing, recording and streaming option and can support up to 1080p resolution.

Hughes Network Solutions (News - Alert) LLC

Hughes Enterprise VoIP

www.hughes.com

Hughes Enterprise VoIP was launched in January 2011 and targets highly distributed multi-site enterprises?those with 50 to 10,000 locations?such as retail, restaurant and convenience store chains. Hughes Enterprise VoIP relies on the Hughes Converged Broadband Architecture (CBA) networking platform, which incorporates innovative, proprietary technology to ensure end-to-end QoS and high network availability.

Hughes Enterprise VoIP provides distributed enterprises with all of the benefits of converged voice and data services, including the advanced features and convenience of VoIP, while significantly lowering overall telecom costs – as compared to leased line MPLS alternatives – for the branch site. As an example, for a distributed network requiring high-speed WAN and with five voice lines at each site, the total spend, including fees and taxes, would cost approximately $700/site/month with a T1/MPLS. In comparison, Hughes’ solution costs less than $400 per month. For an enterprise with 500 sites, this amounts to a savings of more than $5 million over a typical three-year term. 

The architecture includes analog telephone adaptors that reside on the customer premises, and Metaswitch feature servers, Acme Packet session border controllers, and Cisco routers on the hosted side. All hosted-end components are fully redundant in the data centers, and there is another layer of redundancy provided by geographically diverse data centers. Also, the company provides the Hughes access router, HN7700SR, which incorporates Hughes WAN Optimization and Hughes ActiveQoS technologies and its peer gateway, routers, and firewalls on the hosted side.

Hughes ActiveQoS technology ensures proper treatment of real-time traffic across what would otherwise be a best-effort connection. Hughes ActiveQoS uses sophisticated premises-based intelligence to transport real-time traffic with significantly reduced jitter and packet loss end-to-end over a broadband network. The result: consistent high-quality voice calls. In addition, Hughes CBA incorporates integral WAN optimization, which creates bandwidth for multiple voice calls over broadband by applying data reduction technology for all non-VoIP applications.

Hughes told TMC Labs, “To the best of our knowledge, Hughes Enterprise VoIP is the first service to offer enterprise grade voice/data convergence over broadband VPN. This capability is of significant value to the distributed enterprises, where voice/data convergence remains limited due to the high cost of leased line access.”

JDSU

PacketPortal

www.jdsu.com

TMC Labs is very impressed with JDSU’s PacketPortal, which truly is an innovative network monitoring and management software tool. Targeting wireless and telecommunications operators, MSOs, enterprise service providers, and NEMs, JDSU’s PacketPortal is a new software solution (with a February 2012 launch) that gathers intelligence on voice, video and data applications anywhere in the network to aid troubleshooting and optimize the customer experience. The platform offers visibility at every hop in the network, enabling a technician at a central location to locate and fix problems quickly without deploying field technicians, saving opex.

It utilizes intelligent microprobes that are easily embedded in the customer’s existing routers, switches and other network elements without increasing footprint or power consumption. These microprobes are auto-discovered and registered with the PacketPortal software platform residing at the host location, providing network intelligence for the service provider’s application environment. Impressively, the first generation of PacketPortal captures network data from optical transceivers using small form factor pluggables about the size of a USB memory stick. JDSU shrunk down the data collection to fit inside the microprobe. Standard optical ports can now all be data collection nodes, providing scale and reaching the network’s edge. JDSU told TMC Labs, “In the long term, every network element can be PacketPortal enabled. In the near term, even if we only consider the number of access points at the edge of service provider networks, the market is about a billion dollars.” JDSU added, “PacketPortal is the first to cost-effectively provide service providers with remote visibility all the way to the network edge – where 80 percent of customer issues occur – and uses an innovative cloud-based approach to separate data collection and filtering from management and analysis.”

PacketPortal was introduced with five comprehensive customer experience management applications. They cover the full gambit of networking monitoring, including support for 4G/LTE, triple-play and consumer content analysis. That includes JDSU Signaling Analyzer Real Time (SART), JDSU Triple Play Analyzer, JDSU Network Analyzer, Wireshark, and nProbe with Netflow support. Combined, these five applications offer wireless analysis, VoIP analysis, voice and video quality analysis, packet analysis, and much more. Perhaps the most innovative design feature is how PacketPortal has decoupled the functions of data collection and filtering from network management and aggregation. Besides the obvious benefits of reduced size, cost, and complexity, JDSU’s PacketPortal also has an innovative cloud approach to managing network intelligence gathering.

JDSU

JDSU TrueSpeed Automated TCP Test Solutionwww.jdsu.com

In September 2011, JDSU developed the test methodology known as RFC 6349 in collaboration with two major global network operators. It was recently published by the Internet Engineering Task Force as a repeatable service activation test method for managed IP networks. Knowing that JDSU was deeply involved with this new testing RFC standard certainly gives JDSU deep insights into service providers’ testing methodology wants and needs.

No doubt JDSU designed the innovative JDSU TrueSpeed Automated TCP Test Solution with this RFC in mind, which indeed is fully compliant to the new IETF RFC 6349, Framework for TCP Throughput Testing. TrueSpeed enables service providers to install and test Ethernet services without impacting business applications that run on the transmission control protocol layer. JDSU explained, “Traditionally, the provider installs Ethernet services using RFC2544 or other types of layer 2/3 tests, but the customer’s business applications run on the TCP layer. This gap in testing is the cause of customer complaints/churn and significantly increases opex for service providers, due to additional truck rolls per service activation.”

The platform gives you the ability to ensure end customer satisfaction before service is activated, prevent customer churn, avoid future troubleshooting truck rolls, and solve the bandwidth discrepancy mystery by applying best practices per RFC 6349. With TrueSpeed, field technicians are able to evaluate the TCP and application layer in less than five minutes. JDSU customer case studies show that TrueSpeed saves service providers at least 20 percent on operating expenditures by resolving more issues remotely. Leveraging a test methodology JDSU developed (RFC 6349), it can measure the end user quality of experience when uploading and downloading video and other high-bandwidth content. Importantly, it is fully automated TCP testing ensuring that even inexperienced technicians can perform TCP throughput tests.  XO Communications is a well-known company leveraging the TrueSpeed platform in its network.

LifeSize, a division of Logitech

LifeSize ClearSea

www.lifesize.com 

When you think of high-end videoconferencing and telepresence systems for the enterprise, certainly Cisco, LifeSize, Polycom and Vidyo come to mind. LifeSize pioneered the HD telepresence market, bringing the first HD telepresence system to market back in 2005. LifeSize ClearSea is its enterprise-class client/server solution for desktop and mobile video collaboration. LifeSize ClearSea is open and interoperable; users can seamlessly connect from their desktops or mobile devices to any standards-based video collaboration system or infrastructure solution in seconds. LifeSize ClearSea Server is available as a hardware appliance or virtual machine software and includes a HD desktop client for PC/Mac and Android (News - Alert)/iOS smartphones and tablets.

ClearSea supports both H.323 (legacy equipment) and SIP endpoints (with encryption support) with video resolutions that include 1080p, 720p, 4CIF, CIF, QCIF, SQCIF; up to 2mbps on desktop. ClearSea helps lower the TCO with excellent management features, including automatic provisioning, configuration and secure authentication of LifeSize ClearSea client based on user credentials and automatic update of new client releases. It supports user authentication with external databases/LDAP and a centralized contacts directory for ease of management as well.

The platform supports H.239 presentation, H.224, H.281, H.263, H.263+, and H.264. Importantly, it acts as a session border controller to handle NAT/firewall traversal. Video supports multiparty 1080p at 30 fps, with up to 26 participants, and no limit in concurrent rooms. The audio codec support includes  G.711 μ-law, A-law, G.722.1 Annex-C (Polycom Siren14), and it has full-duplex Acoustic Echo Canceller and Audio Denoise Filter with VAD. It also supports call recording with playback and export capabilities. Importantly, you can send in-band or out-of-band DTMF. Further, to improve the user experience, it supports automatic bandwidth control, adaptive to actual network conditions and adaptive low-latency packet-loss recovery. Lastly, it sports excellent mobile client access with the first HD telepresence solution to support both iOS and Android.

Siemens Enterprise Communications

OpenScape UC Suite

www.siemens-enterprise.com

OpenScape UC Suite is a unified communications platform that can scale to hundreds of thousands employees. Siemens architected UC Suite to support up to 40,000 users per cluster, and up to 500,000 users per system. The architecture also features unified domain clusters for presence, messaging, contact and directory integration. Once you get to this size, federation with other UC platforms becomes critical. Siemens UC Suite supports expanded multi-vendor presence and messaging federation enabling seamless collaboration with other XMPP-based UC, messaging, social media and collaborative solutions including Google Apps. OpenScape UC Suite is available as either a hosted or on-premises solution. In a hosted scenario, the solution resides on servers in the hosted data center; on the customer premises it requires just the users’ phones and laptop/desktop computers. Siemens told TMC Labs, “Because it is an open, standards-based system, we don’t create vendor lock-in, and we offer an easy migration path to UC. We offer proven enterprise-grade voice capabilities. We are massively scalable with minimal server footprint. We don’t rely on third-party [companies] for service and support, and we don’t impose complex and expensive proprietary technology stacks.”

OpenScape Mobile UC Client for Android and iOS, featuring new OpenScape Communication Gestures, supports an innovative Call Swipe Gesture to transfer calls-in-progress seamlessly to other devices with intuitive hand gestures on a touch-screen interface. The mobile clients also feature presence, one-number service, and VoWLAN. In the last six months, the company has improved administration and maintenance, made installation and configuration easier, enhanced virtualization, security, web collaboration, desktop videoconferencing, and integration clients for the most common groupware solutions.

snom technology

snom UC edition portfolio for Microsoft Lync

www.snom.com

snom UC edition portfolio for Microsoft Lync is a line of IP desktop phones designed for unified communications and qualified for use with Microsoft Lync Server 2010. The portfolio features three phone models – the snom 821 UC, snom 370 UC edition, and snom 300 UC edition, which are currently the only phones on the market compatible with both Microsoft Lync and standards-based (SIP) IP PBX platforms. This allows enterprises to use a single set of phones that can operate in a mixed environment of Lync 2010 and SIP on a single phone without an additional gateway – making migration to Microsoft Lync a smoother process. The portfolio also includes a fourth model, the snom UC600, specifically designed for only Microsoft Lync.

The snom UC portfolio adds support for the productivity features included in Lync, such as presence, server-side address book search, and quick dialing from Lync buddy lists. It also features HD voice, conferencing, three-way calling, multiple lines, status buttons and address book. snom claims that the snom UC portfolio of IP desktop, SIP-based phones are the first and only standards-based devices that are compatible and qualified for Microsoft Lync Server 2010 as well as hosted Lync, leveraging the Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Multitenant Pack for Partner Hosting reference architecture. This makes the snom line of IP phones perfect for cloud-based Lync service providers. The phones are capable of supporting multiple SIP and/or Lync accounts (up to 12 for the snom 821 UC edition, up to four for the snom 300 UC edition). The snom 821 executive-class desktop phones include a high-resolution TFT color display and an on-board gigabit Ethernet switch.

Symphony Teleca Corp.

m-Suite

www.symphonyteleca.com

Symphony Teleca m-Suite is a portfolio of services, platforms and partnerships that help enterprises accelerate their mobility strategies, retain control of their costs, and manage their mobile security. m-Suite includes m-Suite Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) 2.11, m-Suite Enterprise Application Storefront (EAS) V6.0, m-Suite Mobile Device Management (MDM) based on SAP’s Afaria 7.0 platform , and m-Suite Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) 11.10. m-Suite, and associated Enterprise Mobility Services, targets large enterprises and top-tier service operators.

m-Suite is provided as a fully managed, cloud-based service. Customers just need secure browser access and VPN connectivity. It supports the major cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and private cloud. Symphony Teleca has developed its own proprietary technology stack to optimize cloud deployments, thereby delivering m-Suite from a mobile- optimized cloud.

Symphony Teleca claims to be the first to offer a truly integrated mobile device management and telecom expense management platform and the first to offer mobile apps for telecom expense management, which cover all major the smartphone operating systems – iOS, Android and BlackBerry (News - Alert). The company also claims to be the first to deliver a cloud-based MEAP, and first to provide a platform that is integrated with an enterprise application storefront. The latest release of m-Suite CLM grants enterprises the ability to define and deliver complex mobile device and telecom expense manage workflows using a simple graphical user interface.

Symphony Teleca took its popular consumer app store platform and augmented its feature set to meet the demands of the enterprise market. Symphony Teleca explained, “Enterprise employees can now enjoy a rich consumer-like user experience when discovering and accessing mobile applications and services. IT departments benefit from reduced operational and support costs, and are able to provide their end users with secure access to corporate resources and tools without sacrificing corporate governance.”

Toshiba America Information Systems, Telecommunication Systems Division

Call Manager for IPedge

www.telecom.toshiba.com

Toshiba’s Call Manager for IPedge gives enterprise and SMB users of Toshiba’s IPedge IP business telephone systems a powerful unified communications solution that includes a friendly graphical user interface (ribbon GUI), button flexibility, fully featured call control, presence viewer, IM chat, and a softphone option.

Softphones aren’t new; however, Call Manager truly emulates the complete functionality of the desk telephone. This goes well beyond the basics by adding multiple DN appearances for call coverage and easy multiple call answering, feature prompting with soft key operation, fixed and programmable feature buttons, etc., just as if you were sitting at your desk phone. Call Manager creates a dual-use scenario in which it’s used both at your desk as a UC client to provide all the usual desktop call control, presence, IM/chat functionality, and also used remotely as a softphone to provide the same UC functions as those on your desk telephone.

The Ribbon UI groups all the common features and functionalities together to make it fast and easy to find the feature or functionality needed. The Ribbon format features multiple tabs, each of which is broken down into groups. Call Manager 7.5 allows the user to choose one of three display modes: regular, compact, and slim docking. Call Manager 7.5 has hot keys that allow the user to click to dial any highlighted number. Users can also assign many new functions to hot keys, including answer and hang-up, which is especially important in high-volume call centers where keystroke shortcuts are faster than reaching for the mouse and clicking on a button. Users can program up to 200 different triggers and actions, allowing them to customize Call Manager 7.5 for their own unique personal call handling applications.