SIP — One Year Later

During the SIP track at last year's ViDe Conference, we asked the question "How should I position my university's video conferencing services with regard to SIP?" This year we would like to ask the experts how have the SIP-based products matured in the past year, and are universities staring to integrate SIP and SIP-based video into their videoconferencing environments.

Following introductory remarks by Larry Amiot, Oscar Newerk will discuss the use of SIP in Microsoft's Live Communications Server (LCS). LCS uses SIP/SIMPLE for presence reporting and text-based Instant Messaging. It is the signaling protocol for establishing audio/video conferencing sessions and application-sharing sessions. In the LCS 2005 release, SIP serves as the wire protocol to support Federation with other LCS instances. With LCS 2005 Service Pack 1 and the Public IM Connectivity Pack, LCS also uses SIP to federate to the "public" IM clouds such as AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. With the next version of the client (Microsoft Office Communicator) LCS will provide complete telephony integration, connecting gateways to PBXs and the PSTN networks using SIP.

Bob Randall will discuss the deployment of SIP based Audio/Video/Collaborative solutions in customer hosted and network/application provider hosted environments. He will look at service provider and user acceptance and expectation of SIP based systems. Challenges addressed will include integration with existing directory infrastructures and interoperability with h.323 legacy systems. He will then be joined remotely by Phil Chiaramonte. They will talk about the site wide deployment at the University of Southern California and at the Internet2 Commons.

RADVISION's presentation will discuss the Microsoft LCS SIP-based technology and architecture, and how RADVISION solutions complement and extend that technology, facilitating the mass deployment of the LCS desktop conferencing solution. You will hear how RADVISION's technology provides the needed connectivity and controls that allow users to integrate this conferencing solution into their normal daily workflow from anywhere, at anytime, and with any device, no matter what the environment. RADVISION also provides the network management tools necessary to effectively schedule and control your conferencing network for optimum utilization and performance. And because RADVISION solutions are open-system and standards-based, they are endpoint agnostic, highlighting the importance of selecting a flexible and scaleable network solution, rather than one that is endpoint-driven.

Larry Amiot is a Digital Video Systems Engineer at Northwestern University in Academic Technologies, and he has been instrumental in integrating digital video technology into Northwestern's educational activities. He has held senior management positions in Argonne National Laboratory's Computing Services Division as both Acting Division Director and Associate Division Director, and he previously held a position with Internet2. Larry is a member of the Internet2 Commons Management Team, co-chairs the Internet2 Digital Video Initiative working group, and is a member of the Video Development Initiative. Phil Chiaramonte is the Associate Senior Vice President of Auxiliary Services for USC. Oscar Newkerk is a Developer Architect in the Real Time Collaboration group at Microsoft. He works with ISVs and developers to educate them on the methods of integrating Live Communications Server capabilities into applications by doing presentations, writing samples, and publishing white papers. Prior to his current job, Oscar has been a Program Manager in the Speech Recognition group helping to define the managed API for speech recognition and text-to-speech and a Technical Evanglist in the Developer Division supporting .NET programming models. Bob Randall is Chief Executive Officer of Wave Three Software. He has been responsible for the development of the company's SIP-based, cross-platform, Session Communication Software product line and its deployment in the education and medical research markets. Adi Regev is the senior director of sales engineering at RADVISION, where he provides focused technical sales leadership and strategic business development. Regev manages a team of sales engineers and is involved in large scale video network design and engineering initiatives.