- The Interop trade show took place last week in New York City. More video vendors attended than had in previous years. This is certainly a sign of the emergence of video as a significant data type on corporate IT networks. Video conferencing vendors Cisco, Polycom and Huawei all had booths. Huawei was featuring a telepresence system had a popular booth for much of the show. Cisco was demonstrating desktop video systems and featured MediaNet software that manages and monitors video conference and VoIP flows.
- IP surveillance vendor, Axis Communications, demonstrated systems that had impressive depth of field, important in capturing evidence of an intruder’s activities. IXIA, a major manufacturer of test and measurement equipment, was showing its cloud-based service offering for monitoring video conferencing sessions. This novel concept allows users to buy troubleshooting and monitoring capability as a browser based service on a demand basis. Xirrus, a manufacturer of wireless devices, was promoting access points that uniquely handle wireless links to video devices. When different devices are connected using a variety of bandwidths, the access points don’t operate at the slowest of the speeds as traditional endpoints have done. Each device can operate at the speed it is capable of supporting.
- In several session presentations, reference to video on the network was used as an illustration for discussing everything from wireless endpoints to storage area networks. For the last several years, more video technology has been introduced to this premier IT show.
Phil Hippensteel, Ph.D, is a professor of information systems at Penn State Harrisburg.
