General observations
Delegates from the education and health sectors that attended the summit included UoW, USYD, CSU, LaTrobe, QLD TAFE, Swinburne, Griffith, SA TAFE and AARNet. Tandberg briefly summarised their new products including Experia (Telepresence), Movi (PC video conferencing), HD, SIP, OCS integration, mobility and streaming stressing that a integrated suite of solutions tailored to business needs was important to encourage greater adoption and use. Photos from day one are available online at http://picasaweb.google.com/aarnetrtc
Serge Sardo (CEO of the Australian Human Resource Institute)
discussed "Employee engagement". He explained the rise of the buyers
HR market due to the growth in retirees and low fertility rate.
Employers have to market their job vacancies and promote the
organization as employees increasingly want to know what is in it for
them.
Increasing the workplace pool is happening through increases in General
Skilled Migration; however global migration competition is growing.
Staff turnover is estimated to cost 150% of an employee salary to cover
recruitment, induction and lost revenue costs. Disengaged employees
are costing billions of dollars in Australia. Good HR strategies will
keep employees and those that contribute 4 times more to the business
need special attention. To engage them requires a strong purpose and
meaning to the job and developing co-worker and manager relationships.
Tackling retention requires measurement and reporting, a range of
systems are available. Organisation's need to build retention costs in
their budgets. Initiatives to retain and engage staff should be
identified and implemented.
Sean Lessman (Tandberg) presented on Advanced
Applications, SIP and connectivity. The PSTN system was based on
solutions to scale use over time. H.323 was designed to mimic the PST
system, whilst SIP was designed to start over. SIP is a protocol for
setting up and tearing down communications, designed at the same time
as H.323 in 1996 based on web protocol concept. It is not a video or
audio protocol, not a firewall traversal protocol, not a collaboration
protocol. SIP extensions (RFC 3261) describe starting and stopping
sessions where extensions developed that are unique to specific vendor
implementations. VoIP is moving to SIP, presence would be next as part
of the unified communications integration path. H.323 has scaling
issues with gatekeepers and endpoints whilst SIP makes use of DNS in a
SIP proxy to connect endpoints together in a more scalable way. Some
best practices have been taken from SIP to H.323 such as URI
diallling. H.323 appears to be going nowhere, SIP will dominate
desktop voice, video, web. Tandberg VCS is designed for SIP to H.323
interworking with Tandberg products supporting both natively and active
simultaneously. There is a 90% feature parity in SIP. SIP enhancement
support cover approx 47 RFCs (from 1889 to 4796). SIP supports
application convergence, mobility, telephony features, next gen
telephone network, network intelligence to support new services easier
and cheaper endpoints. SIP enables calls to a person not a location
where the call finds me, this saves the hassle on a multi-step process
of finding and contacting someone. SIP enables unified communications.
Andrew Pillon (Tandberg) talked about VC investment through ease of use. It requires a number of building blocks for success as follows:
• A technical architecture/roadmap,
• Executive sponsorship (outside the IT department) for visible
support and organization wide motivation. CEOs/CIO need to declare
support to the investment and vision.
• Resources need to be in place for marketing (brand awareness,
PR), super users (to educate and inspire as liaison between users and
IT departments) and technical to make sure what works, works.
• Training is required to build confidence, understanding
including positive impacts to staff which increases the adoption curve.
• Measurement and monitoring is a constant to review and assess use (adoption curve and ROI)
Dimension data discussed unified communications and how to switch
between different levels of communication as opposed to the delivery of
a pure rich single solution. Integration is necessary through
middleware and so that people cam communicate and collaborate taking
account of operational management and security. Collaboration would
business and IT yields any business benefits, starting that journey
will deliver business continuity and resilience capabilities, increased
agility of business processes, support for new services and ways to
reduce costs through one touch provisioning.
Steve Neville & Will McDonald (Tandberg)
discussed the Tandberg bridging products now available as a result of
the Codian acquisition, namely the MCU and IPVCR, ISDN gateway (3501)
where an ISDN overhaul is underway to support PRIs with hardware for
them (4 PRIs) in the box, that can go up to 8 PRIs on the MSE chassis
blade, a lot of audio ports. Codian's IP GW 3500 supports a range of
codecs, signalling and media, for example one site has CCM and IP
phones, the GW sets up a dial plan to rewrite phone numbers to IP/MAC
addresses, this avoids opening up the CCM to the internet. Another
example is where a user dials in, an auto attendant has a list of
allowed calls to limit access to only specific conferences. TMS is
integrated with Codian 4500 so that live conferences can be managed by
TMS, a new version of the MCU software is required to support an
upgraded API.
Sean Lessman (Tandberg) spoke on content streaming
with archiving allowing those unable to attend to gain access to
improve productivity. The TCS is a network device to create business
quality video and multimedia presentations on demand. TCS supports
content from SIP/H.323 sources, most customers were using it to record
as opposed to for live streaming. It can deliver content on Windows
Media, Quicktime and Real, with an open API to integrate with existing
portals and download support for Zune and iPOD. TCS can register with
Gatekeepers using alias templates to decide what is recorded and who
has access. Administration is achieved centraly with local or MS
Active Directory user management for security. Management can be via
TMS or the content server. TCS supports multicast so long as its on a
multicast network. he new 3.0 supports 5 concurrent calls, 2 live. Off
line transcoded output from all recordings. Video SIP support, H264
and H263 video supported, MPEG 4 media encoding and secure support for
AES and DES encyption is supported. Digital Rights Management is not
supported today. 3rd party devices can provide content management and
monitoring.