I like to tell the joke that in about a hundred years from now we’ll finally have flying cars, AI robots will be performing surgery, and we’ll all still be debating videoconferencing interoperability. It is the challenge and topic that seemingly just won’t go away.
[Tech Perspectives: The Emperor Has No Clothes]
Users continue to lament that videoconferencing should be just as easy as making a phone call. These comments neglect to consider that telephony was developed under a monopoly (AT&T) that could easily set and enforce the standard dialing and connection rules.
Videoconferencing, while initially pioneered by AT&T, was actually developed for the market by multiple firms that each had a vested interest in maintaining their walled gardens. That is the specific and sole reason that interoperability is so hard to achieve. What is clearly possible (and in fact easy) in today’s labs is prevented by policies and decisions made in the boardrooms of today’s providers.
It is clearer than ever that the videoconferencing industry has experienced immense growth, evolving from clunky, incompatible systems to become an essential tool for global communication and collaboration. However, despite the advancements, interoperability has been the one persistent issue that has continually plagued the industry.
While individual companies often promote open communication and connectivity, the reality is that many still create barriers by locking users into proprietary ecosystems. The demand for seamless cross-platform communication is more critical than ever, but achieving true interoperability has remained elusive.
A History of Incompatibility
In the early days of videoconferencing, the issue of interoperability was particularly pronounced. Companies like VTel, CLI, and PictureTel championed the H.320 standard, intended to enable communication across vendors via ISDN networks. However, in practice, these systems often failed to work smoothly between different brands—and intercompany calls required complex, costly infrastructure such as hardware bridges.
Despite the claims of standards like H.320, each vendor added proprietary enhancements, making true cross-platform communication nearly impossible. Vendors had little incentive to improve interoperability, preferring instead to lock customers into their ecosystems, ensuring they would purchase not only the hardware but often ongoing services and support from a single provider.
One of the most significant moments in the industry’s evolution was the shift from ISDN to IP-based networks in the late 1990s and early 2000s, marked by the adoption of the H.323 standard. While this new standard was designed to support audio, video, and data communication over IP networks, vendors still managed to tweak it for their own devices. Additionally, inter-company IP-based calling now had to deal with firewall restrictions, which again had no industry universal solution. The result was a continuation of the same proprietary issues that plagued the ISDN days—vendors continued to prioritize intra-brand functionality over true interoperability.
The emergence of the Immersive Telepresence phenomenon around 2006 further highlighted the industry's struggle with interoperability. Cisco became the market leader with their version of this immersive solution. Its HD videoconferencing solution delivered exceptional quality but was a closed system (like most others), only able to communicate with other Cisco TelePresence devices.
Initially, Cisco described this limitation as a “feature” of maintaining high-quality video, and then helped set up extraordinarily expensive exchanges to connect their systems between companies. Eventually realizing the limitations of this model, Cisco began to shift toward more open standards, first employing a Radvision bridge and acquiring Tandberg, a company known for its advocacy of open systems, in 2010. This marked a turning point for Cisco, as it began supporting more cross-brand communication, but the industry overall was still far from achieving full interoperability.
Enter Microsoft
Microsoft took a different approach to interoperability by first backing its own flavor of interoperability, then a standard one based on Web-RTC—a technology that allowed real-time communication directly through web browsers without requiring additional plug-ins or software. This decision, however, created new challenges, as WebRTC was not compatible with traditional videoconferencing standards.
To bridge the gap between Microsoft’s solutions (like Skype for Business and later Microsoft Teams) and other systems, third-party Cloud Video Interop (CVI) solutions were introduced. Companies like Pexip, Polycom, and others developed these solutions within Microsoft-controlled and provided parameters to enable non-Microsoft systems to connect to Microsoft’s platforms. CVI followed the same pattern of allowing basic compatibilities amongst disparate systems, but again could not handle many of the features that existed when one stayed within one brand.
The videoconferencing industry remains fragmented, with many vendors resisting full interoperability to protect the market position of their ecosystems.
CVI was followed by a strategy called Direct Guest Join. This feature simplified the process of joining meetings across platforms without the need for third-party infrastructure or hardware bridges. Initially, Direct Guest Join allowed users of Microsoft Teams and Zoom to join each other’s meetings with a single click.
Cisco Webex and Google Meet later joined this compatibility circle, extending the range of platforms that could communicate with one another. However, the connections via Direct Guest Join were and still are not universal. Each platform has to permit the specific combination/connection—and not all do. Meanwhile, a third option involves services that either provide a cloud interconnect between differing platforms, or in some cases, provide their own virtual meeting room (VMR).
[On Your Business: Technology Isn't Enough]
What is important to note with all these options is they each have pros and cons—with the cons often being limitations in capabilities, scope, or allowable connections. So, what we essentially have is a total throwback to the early days of H.320 where basic compatibility across brands (or in this case platforms) means severe feature limitations. There is also the concept of what is “allowed” versus “certified,” highlighting that these issues are less technical obstacles than they are an attempt to control the space.
Band-Aids, Not Solutions
In recent years, the industry has seen the number of CVI providers drop for various reasons. Verizon eventually shut down the BlueJeans service it purchased, while Avaya, HP|Poly, and now Cisco for its FedRAMP customers have made agreements with Pexip to leverage its solution. Even Microsoft—typically a stickler for pushing people only to Direct Guest Join—has embraced a more feature-rich offering from Pexip. I’d love to speculate that this means the interoperability wars are coming to an end, but I’m not that naive.
Other firms like Synergy SKY have taken the approach to leverage the available standards of SIP and WebRTC used by the web apps of most modern meeting platforms to enable any SIP-based endpoint to join non-compatible meeting platforms. Its system can provide “one button to join” for scheduled meetings, ad-hoc join by Meeting ID, or manual SIP URI dialing for inviting guests to any meeting. Its focus is to solve interoperability and to provide a consistent user experience for all meetings, not just Microsoft. However, it's a solution for SIP/hardware-based endpoints only.
All the interoperability solutions available are still patchwork Band-Aids to a broader problem. The videoconferencing industry remains fragmented, with many vendors resisting full interoperability to protect the market position of their ecosystems.
Despite the demand for open standards and universal compatibility, true seamless interoperability remains a challenge that the industry has yet to fully address. Or, to put it another way, every manufacturer and platform provider fully supports having one industry standard for videoconferencing, as long as the one is theirs.
Plus, don’t think that once an organization has chosen its preferred video collaboration platform, every use case will conform to that choice. It won’t. Clients, customers, suppliers, and sometimes even internal divisions will still force the best organized and prepared firms to be compatible with multiple flavors of video.
[Editorial: AI Can Help Us All Be Lions]
What is important for end users and integrators is to compare the available interoperability methods and make a conscious choice which method to use well before it is needed. Be sure to verify each of the claims made, because they are sometimes more hype than reality. And, as is always the case in situations like this, your mileage may vary. Now, where is that flying car I was promised by now…
