unified communications
enterprise unified communications views and opinions
Wednesday 19 November 2008, 7:41 PM
Mitel Unified Communications clients and TeleCollaboration
Mitel has announced desktop and mobile Unified Communications (UC) clients with some excellent features and their own flavour of telepresence which might compete with other HD solutions but wont compete with leading telepresence solutions.
The UC desktop client include some key features that immediately stand out; the ability to federate with public presence sources and integration with their mobile UC client. Better still the mobile UC client is available across Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberry. These feature releases are essential to providing integrated UC solutions and from an industry perspective come hot on the heals of magic quadrant provider Cisco who has also only just released desktop to mobile integrated presence and the support for a Microsoft Mobile UC client.
In addition Mitel has announced the availability of their TeleCollaboration solution for Q1 2009. Mitel claims an improved result over telepresence due to desktop sharing and recording capabilities (see below image). The video component of the solution is actually provided by a company called Magor.
While the collaboration aspects may provide an improvement I can immediately see their is no comparision to a telepresence solution such as Polycoms RPX (see below image). Telepresence is not just high definition video conferencing (which is a better description for Mitels solution), telepresence allows users to interact as if they were in the same room. Imperative components of telepresence solutions include having completely controlled room environments that look identical at all locations, with immersive lighting, with immersive audio and screens that are large enough to allow users to stand up and move around without disappearing from view - the Mitel offering does not achieve this. Ultimately price will dictate if the Mitel solution compares to existing market high definition solutions, however given current information it wont compete with true telepresence rooms.
The UC desktop client include some key features that immediately stand out; the ability to federate with public presence sources and integration with their mobile UC client. Better still the mobile UC client is available across Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberry. These feature releases are essential to providing integrated UC solutions and from an industry perspective come hot on the heals of magic quadrant provider Cisco who has also only just released desktop to mobile integrated presence and the support for a Microsoft Mobile UC client.
In addition Mitel has announced the availability of their TeleCollaboration solution for Q1 2009. Mitel claims an improved result over telepresence due to desktop sharing and recording capabilities (see below image). The video component of the solution is actually provided by a company called Magor.
While the collaboration aspects may provide an improvement I can immediately see their is no comparision to a telepresence solution such as Polycoms RPX (see below image). Telepresence is not just high definition video conferencing (which is a better description for Mitels solution), telepresence allows users to interact as if they were in the same room. Imperative components of telepresence solutions include having completely controlled room environments that look identical at all locations, with immersive lighting, with immersive audio and screens that are large enough to allow users to stand up and move around without disappearing from view - the Mitel offering does not achieve this. Ultimately price will dictate if the Mitel solution compares to existing market high definition solutions, however given current information it wont compete with true telepresence rooms.
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