Cisco to boost voice, video virtualization

current virtualization technology does not support video and voice, said an executive at Cisco, said his company has launched a virtualization architecture that can solve this problem.

In a Cisco TelePresence meeting Tuesday of the Bangalore office, Dinesh Malkani, managing director of collaboration in Asia and the Pacific, said the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been an industry standard for a long time. However, VDI has been “limited” data virtualization and applications and is not very effective for collaborative applications such as voice or video, he said.

Cisco hopes to fill that void with infrastructure virtualization experience (VXI). VXI Malkani explained that sit on top of VDI and be able to provide a multimedia experience for voice communications and videoconferencing in a fully virtualized environment.

The company has partnered with providers of Citrix and VMware virtualization, “said Malkani.

With virtualization, companies will have a better return on investment (ROI) because there is no need to buy “desktop hard” for users, he said. Users can also access information in the data center on any device, at any time, he added.

The changing face of collaboration
According to Malkani, collaboration tools, the company is moving away from text-based communication such as email and instant messaging, other tools like video conferencing, social networks, blogs and voice messages.

“Users choose how they want to work … You can not impose a user from the way it has to work. Every CIO must find a way to put [different collaboration tools] together,” he said.

Malkani video believed to usurp the voice channel as the collaboration of the election. Echoing the statement of Cisco, John Chambers, CEO ‘”The video is the new voice,” Malkani said users selected video through the voice of cooperation after you make a video call is as simple as that for a voice call.

In anticipation of becoming the dominant video products, the future of all those sent by Cisco have video functionality, he added. This will be possible for users to have video conferencing for collaboration on any device, anywhere, anytime, he said.

Company to leverage expertise
Malkani deflected questions about whether the company believes Microsoft Lync – Redmond renowned suite of unified communications – as a competitor. Instead, Cisco said “decades” of experience in voice communication and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) as well as the ability of products to run on different operating systems.

He added that networks play an important role in promoting the use of collaboration tools, because users are unlikely to use the tools if they have a bad experience.

Malkani also stressed that collaboration is moving into the video and not just text-based communications. With broadband is everywhere and 4G networks around the corner, the video also will move to mobile devices, he added.