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More than a Year  ago I was reading a post by John Bartlett of NoJitter about the network requirements of mass video conferencing deployments, and I felt obliged to pacify John, and all of you, that with the help of “John the Plumber” we will all be safe by the time video conferencing hell breaks loose.

In that “John the Plumber” post I’ve written last November, I was referring to the bandwidth challenge, but bandwidth is not – surprise, surprise – the only challenge facing mass deployment of video conferencing, for there is also an issue of capacity.

In John’s original post, he estimated approximately 115 endpoints for every 1000 employees. Out of those 115, 100 were desktop clients. IMHO, a real mass deployment should put a desktop client on every desktop, thus increasing the magnitude to approximate 1K endpoints for every 1K employees.

This means that we, as an industry, will have to support thousands of potential customers, most of who are HD users. This is quite a challenge in terms of scalability, for today’s hardware-based conferencing bridges, as the rule of thumb in HW solutions usually is, “more users – more hardware”.

On the other hand, software-based bridges, which can handle a great number of concurrent users, are quite limited when it comes to capabilities, especially when you are talking about high definition H.264 video with SVC tools for every user (which are already available, for instance via our desktop client).

There are a lot of arguments regarding “the best approach” to all this. In some cases – where the deployments are small, simple, homogenic – a software solution may be the best solution. In other cases – where the deployement is heterogenic, large-scale, distributed – hardware seems like the only way to go.

I must admit that I myself have been contemplating this Hardware-Software conflict for a while now. I believe that the solution is, as it usually is, a hybrid of these two “philosophies”. In other words, it’s all about a balance between HW and SW.

“Get The Balance Right” by Depeche Mode

The HW-SW Balance

In one of their many classic 80’s hits, “Get The Balance Right”, Depeche Mode wrote:

“Don’t take this way, don’t take that way
Straight down the middle until next Thursday
Push to the left, back to the right
Twist and turn ’til you’ve got it right…”

Finding a right balance is very true in regards to many things in life, HW and SW conflict included. Such a balance you can find in our Solution Version 7, which was announced at InfoComm 09. The basic philosophy behind it is to give every user, in every scenario, the best possible experience.

What this basically means is that if HW will give you the best solution for your next call, you will use an HW port. If SW will give you the best solution, you will use an SW port. And by “best” I mean optimal in terms of quality of experience as well as cost of experience, as SW ports are much cheaper than HW.

If you are doing a point-to-point call with SCOPIA Desktop inside the organization LAN, there shouldn’t be any need for HW. On the other hand, if you are connecting SCOPIA Desktop with some endpoint and transcoding of some kind is necessary, a HW port may be needed.

In the above illustration, you can easily see how some endpoints connect to the MCUs (the SCOPIA Elite and the SCOPIA Elite 1U) in switching mode (SW) without transcoding, which means that the MCU can support a very large number of users. Others require transcoding (TRX), and so the same MCU can cater to their needs. The conferencing bridges connect to each other using either SW or TRX, depending on the user’s case.

All of this put together means that users can enjoy the best of both worlds. And the number of bridges necessary for your deployment is dependant only on the user  requirements. As this solution allows users to get the right balance for them between HW and SW ports, they can succesfully deploy their video conferencing infrastructure: one that is massively deployed, offers great quality of experience, is cost-effective and is totally managable.

So there you have it – You don’t have to decide. You don’t have to “bet” on this side or the other. You can just twist and turn and enjoy the great balance we now offer.