‘Virtualisation’ is one of those words that has everyone nodding sagely when it is used in a discussion. In the context of video communication, virtualisation, in many people’s eyes, has come to represent the future. So what do we mean by ‘virtualisation’ and what will be its impact? AV News investigates.
“Technological evolution both drives, and is driven by, ever increasing levels of abstraction in hardware and software.” Discuss. This isn’t the subject of some abstract philosophical debate but perhaps the most significant issue in the development of video communication technology over the next few years.
Virtualisation rose to the top of the IT agenda at the point where the software and hardware components of any solution became divorced from each other. High-level programming languages make hardware choice for any given software largely irrelevant.
In fact, with application software cocooned in layers of middleware and dynamic linked libraries (DLLs), the application and middleware can be completely unaware of the details and configuration of the hardware implementations, shielded by operating systems that deal with the specifics of MAC and IP addresses , physical memory configurations, processor counts and the like.
Hardware and software specialists discovered that if they could ‘abstract’ the hardware and its relation to the operating system, they could control the software’s view of the hardware configuration on which it was installed. Remember, the software doesn’t really need to know anything about the hardware as long as it generates the expected results.
It sounds simple, but inevitably the process of virtualisation carries with it some issues. Previous processor generations, for example, throw up objections when used for virtualised environments. Most current operating systems have been developed with a specific operating platform in mind and don’t like to be hoodwinked.
Rationale
So why bother to virtualise? Not too many years ago standard computing platforms were inadequate to support the specialist software applications demanded for compute intensive tasks. Examples included non-linear video editing, CGI, high-resolution imaging and high-end photo processing. All of these applications have given way to standard platforms, with the result that the price of adoption has tumbled, while the rate of adoption has skyrocketed.
Lately, significant change is underway in the video communication world. Providers of video conferencing solutions on proprietary hardware have been experiencing serious commercial issues – some for the first time in their history. Polycom announced its Q4 profits showing a decrease of 96%. Logitech announced a one-time $211 million charge on its LifeSize acquisition (more about this later).
While this is taking place, the software-based video conferencing business tells a different story. In 2012, Avistar Communications saw its revenues increase by 35%. This increase is directly attributed to the industry trend of moving from proprietary hardware-based offerings to more economical, flexible and interoperable software running in virtualise environments on standard hardware.
Adoption
Vidyo has been a pioneer of virtualised VC. In 2011, CEO Ofer Shapiro announced Vidyo’s solution and was reported as saying: “A lot of return-on-investment calculations become positive immediately when you put in a capital expenditure of zero.” Shapiro explained that Vidyo’s technology supports high-quality VC services when using outsourced servers from VMware and others, at a cost (to a service provider) of just $0.3 cents a minute.
A year later Vidyo announced that it would be the first to virtualise the media plane to deliver scalable multipoint telepresence quality video conferencing in virtual computing environments. At the time, Clive Sawkins, CEO of BCS Global Networks, explained the benefits of virtualisation as follows:
“As an existing Vidyo Service Provider, we believe Vidyo’s support for virtualization presents a great opportunity for us. The big differentiation in Vidyo’s strategy is that they can virtualise the media plane, which means we will be able to serve our existing customers much more efficiently, expand their footprints and enter new markets with greater speed, easily enabling customers who are looking to use video communications capabilities. We are already very impressed with the quality, flexibility and affordability of the Vidyo solution; being able to virtualise it is yet another major boost for us and our customers”
A report from Gartner (Competitive Landscape: SMB Videoconferencing Will Come from the Cloud, Worldwide) advised VC vendors to “focus more effort on software-driven solutions for endpoints and infrastructure – these will provide both the cost points and the agility needed to develop new functions quickly in comparison to hardware-based solutions.”
In the Gartner report, senior analyst Scott Morrison commented: “Most SMBs don’t have the capital resources for traditional infrastructure or expensive endpoints, nor do they have dedicated IT staff capable of supporting such environments. Capturing that untapped market requires new approaches: software-based infrastructure solutions delivered from the cloud, coupled with soft clients and low-cost group systems, all of which should be easy to use.”
Vidyo has introduced a virtual video router, the VidyoRouter VE. This enables user sites and and service providers to deploy on existing data centre hardware or in the public cloud. They can provision capacity on-demand, wherever and whenever needed, and deliver video conferencing services across the world without having to invest in dedicated appliances and fixed capacities. VidyoRouter VE runs within the popular WMware virtual computing environment, and delivers natural, universal and affordable video conferencing to mobile devices, PCs, room and telepresence systems over general purpose IP networks. The solution uses Vidyo’s patented Adaptive Video Layering technology to eliminate the latency and intensive processing requirements of transcoding required by traditional MCU based solutions.
For enterprise customers, VidyoRouter VE reduces the costs of deployment and wide area network usage since it can be deployed on cloud computing resources anywhere in the world in minutes. This capability enables the enterprise to distribute the video conferencing infrastructure so that traffic can be localized anywhere there is a pocket of users, keeping more traffic on the lower cost LAN bandwidth and off of the higher cost WAN.
Playing catch-up
With the virtualised approach to video conferencing being seen as the key to opening the cost-conscious SMB sector and to remaining competitive in the corporates, the traditional proprietary hardware vendors are busy developing software offerings. LifeSize has partnered with Avistar, and has embraced the technology deployed in Avistar’s C3 videoconferencing platform. Other are finding it more difficult to shed their hardware heritage, their hardware business model and hardware delivery model.
Polycom has released a software-based MCU but the MCU is delivered on a piece of hardware. And it is reported that Polycom’s software MCU can’t be downloaded, which means. In the opinion of many, it’s not a true virtualised, software deployment. Radvision has taken a similar position with its new software MCU. Currently, we understand that this is only deliverable on Radvision hardware. In contrast, Avistar positions its software based video conferencing platform as standards-based, interoperable and fully virtualised at the client site, or within the cloud.
Looking forward, the momentum is with software, virtualised solutions running industry-standard platforms and networks. With the reductions in capital investment, flexibility of deployment and scalability that these solutions offer, it is hard to see a return to the hardware, and therefore, capital intensive and limited solutions of the past.
