Radvision Preps For High-Def With Scopia

The new family of Multipoint Control Units (MCUs) and gateways debuts as part of Radvision’s strategy to support the convergence of IP voice, video, Web collaboration and presence, said Killko Caballero, general manager of the enterprise business unit at Radvision, Fair Lawn, N.J.

“Videoconferencing is no longer a stand-alone application,” Caballero said. Radvision also launched iView, its new monitoring and management application suite, which provides a centralized view of all video endpoints and network devices. IView enables Web-based scheduling that makes videoconferencing easer to use, he said.

Radvision teamed with LifeSize at the Infocomm conference last week in Orlando, Fla., to demonstrate interoperability between Scopia and LifeSize’s high-def videoconferencing products.

“While the [high-def videoconferencing space] is still very much a nascent market, the platform we have today allows our customers to move toward it,” Caballero said.

The Scopia platform supports conferences of up to 2 Mbits per second, with capacity for 12 to 384 video ports or up to 1,728 audio ports on a single chassis.

The product line’s scalability helps set it apart, said Christopher Platt, director of business development at ReView Video, a conferencing solution provider and distributor in Aurora, Ill.

With previous products, the conferencing experience degrades as more users join and share the available resources, Platt said. “Products Radvision has had in the past, as well as those from other manufacturers, did not scale equally,” he said.

“Now, the new platform is a flat solution from the standpoint that everybody that connects has the same resources as everybody else,” Platt said.

The Scopia family comes in three versions: the 100 for small deployments; the 400, which supports up to four MCU blades for large deployments; and the 1000, a high-capacity, carrier-class version.

The 100 series includes a stand-alone gateway to connect IP videoconferencing with ISDN endpoints and networks, as well as an all-in-one model that includes gateway and MCU functionality. MCUs provide media processing, handling the video and any required changes to resolution and bandwidth needed to ensure quality.

Scopia is available now for about $2,000 per port.