Cisco, with newly merged Tandberg, pushes telepresence standard

From InfoWorld: Cisco and Tandberg made their big post-merger entrance at the InfoComm conference in Las Vegas this week, promoting an interoperability protocol that will come on a product in July and introducing some other new products.

The $3.4 billion merger that closed in April brought together Cisco's fast-growing TelePresence Meeting System business with Tandberg's established lineup of lower end products. It also merged two of the biggest players in video collaboration, presumably carving out a path toward greater interoperability among many of the systems already installed in enterprises.

Cisco is pushing for even broader compatibility across the industry with the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP), which in July will ship in a product for the first time. Cisco developed TIP before the Tandberg acquisition closed and had already begun licensing it free to other vendors, among them Tandberg. Now it is delivering the protocol on its Tandberg TelePresence Server.

TIP is designed to make multiscreen high-definition videoconferencing platforms work together to the point that they know on which screen to place each incoming video stream. It's the first protocol for doing this among multiple vendors' systems, said Charles Stucki, vice president of Cisco's Telepresence Technology Group. TIP can also make the multiple streams used in such sessions appear as one stream so they can better traverse security mechanisms such as firewalls and session border controllers, without being broken up, he said.

"There's no standard in the industry to describe multiscreen systems: For example, in a three screen system, what's right, left, and center," Stucki said.

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