Archive of posts with tag 'video conferencing'

With the pandemic unexpectedly transforming Zoom from a passive business tool to perhaps the defining brand of our socially-distanced times, the tech giant is looking to “give back” a bit this holiday season by removing 40-minute meeting limits over the Thanksgiving holiday. On a non-holiday, free meetings on Zoom are limited to 40 minutes, pushing users to basically re-start their...

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Task management platform Okta recently released the mid-year update to their 2020 @Work Business Report, and the findings tell a familiar story: The recent meteoric rise in cloud and SaaS adoption has been hard to ignore, and is challenging IT to seek out new solutions. As expected, cloud-delivered UCaaS and collaboration applications continue to see unprecedented growth over the past...

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The concept of “work-from-home” (WFH) went from a growing trend to an emergency enterprise standard over the past few months, forcing folks to make major adjustments to how they connect with colleagues and accomplish their day-to-day tasks. While many stir-crazy folks are longing for the days when they can return to the office, a lot of companies are finding that...

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While just a few months ago Zoom was primarily only familiar within the corporate and tech sphere, the company is now ubiquitous in every facet of our newly-remote daily lives; whether we’re using it to say hi to coworkers, or logging on to host a weekly trivia night with friends or family. Another indicator of Zoom’s newfound popularity? The startup...

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While just a few months ago Zoom was primarily only familiar within the corporate and tech sphere, the company is now ubiquitous in every facet of our newly-remote daily lives; whether we’re using it to say hi to coworkers, or logging on to host a weekly trivia night with friends or family. Another indicator of Zoom’s newfound popularity? The startup...

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Social distancing guidelines have made UCaaS tools more than just business-critical solutions, as it seems like every parent and grandparent with WiFi access has been hopping on Zoom and other video conferencing apps to bridge the gap between friends and family in isolation. This has put unprecedented pressure on unified communication providers, whose products demand a higher share of network...

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Like just about any other technology, WebRTC has followed the hype cycle pretty closely. (Were you surprised to see a headline on this topic in 2018?) WebRTC, an open source project, aims to boost mobile apps and browsers to real-time speed using APIs. After reaching peak hype around 2013, we slipped down into the trough of disillusionment. However, at times...

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The Linux Foundation recently announced the LF Networking Fund to combine the multiple open source projects it’s got in the works. These include Open Daylight, Open Platform for NFV and the Open Network Automation Platform, among others. Part of this initiative includes standardizing projects on a single architecture and processes. These various projects in development may bring interesting new technology...

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Video conferencing is increasingly a part of daily office life. Ad-hoc meeting software like Google Hangouts, HipChat, Slack and Skype have popularized virtual face-to-face meetings. But formal meetings with entry codes like GoToMeeting and WebEx are often relied on for marketing webinars or sales demos. Regardless of purpose, video conferencing has evolved over the years from multi-screen hardware deployments to...

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If I had a nickel for every time I heard “We have enough bandwidth,” I would have enough money to buy the new iPad.  While this has not gotten me the iPad, it has given me some great insight into how important knowing your available and utilized bandwidth is to assuring network performance and delivering critical business services like VoIP,...

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With highly distributed network and the expansive transition to cloud services, network and application performance monitoring is becoming more and more challenging. With the increase in IP-based applications like VoIP, Video Conferencing, hosted CRMs, VDI and cloud services offering simpler and easier ways to communicate and operate within an organization. Each application comes with unique performance requirements and settings needed...

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How are you ensuring a successful transition before plugging in the first phone? VoIP, Video and Unified Communications are highly cost-effective network services. While your wallet may be breathing a sigh of relief, your network is about to get the wind knocked out of it by the  weight of VoIP and video conferencing services. Network performance is dependent on existing applications and...

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The reach and popularity of video conferencing, telepresence and visual collaboration services is exploding, enabling business to happen 24×7 around the world. But, if you’re a consumer or provider of these increasingly business-critical applications, you know they depend entirely on one thing: network performance. IP-based videoconferencing requires high-performance WAN links. This class of applications operates within a narrow Quality of...

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Many organizations underestimate the operational and business risk associated with deploying performance sensitive applications like VoIP, video conferencing, IP storage or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to remote locations. Other projects such as transitioning to a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network or integrating company networks due to a merger or acquisition can present significant performance problems for business critical services Prior...

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Today’s video conferencing and telepresence solutions offer amazing reliability, incredible business value and a huge range of features and price points. No wonder there’s so much video running on enterprise networks! But like other IP-based applications from VoIP, to SaaS, to virtual desktops, video conferencing applications are highly sensitive to network performance. The health of your network is vitally important...

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Burgeoning growth in the use of mobile devices is surely among the most significant trends impacting enterprise communications. Much of this growth is uncontrolled, as droves of employees increasingly make use of their personal mobile devices over company networks, as they’re accustomed to doing at home. How can you get a handle on what your mobile users are up to,...

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The cost reduction and infrastructure consolidation benefits of unified communications and collaboration are so compelling that many organizations are rolling out these services without a solution to manage the user experience. Unified communications monitoring may not be the top priority for businesses. Unified communications aims to converge telephony, messaging, mobile communications, video conferencing and presence-enabled applications onto a common, IP-based network. But...

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As a pre-sales engineer, I see a lot of interesting network performance management scenarios while working with future customers on product trials.  I’ve seen everything from a managed switch that had a rogue 10-meg port to a problematic WiFi access point, located in the basement of a hospital! On a recent trial , I was working with a network engineer...

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High-definition video conferencing from your computer or mobile device out to anyone, anywhere has arrived. While all tiers of the video conferencing and telepresence marketplace are experiencing strong growth, the biggest leaps are happening with low-cost, desktop- and browser-based “single-codec” systems. Among the many options in this burgeoning space: Tandberg, now owned by Cisco, offers a range of office, desktop and mobile...

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