Q&A with Dr. J. Chris Lauwers of Avistar

CL: There are huge synergies between virtualization and unified communications and desktop videoconferencing. VDI is about giving people access to their desktops and applications from anywhere, regardless of their location. Unified communications is about giving people access to other people from anywhere, regardless of their location. Both are required to fully deliver the promise of virtual organizations. Consequently, organizations that embrace desktop virtualization frequently find unified communications and desktop videoconferencing to their liking. A natural fit, business-class desktop videoconferencing further leverages the outstanding cost saving and operational efficiency delivered by virtualization solutions, such as Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View. In the past year, we’ve seen a real trend – organizations that have invested heavily in virtualization are very interested in desktop videoconferencing.

Regardless of the environment, the big value of desktop videoconferencing is the superior relationships and connections that video affords. In high-value interactions – sales, negotiations, training, and interviewing, for example – that real-time video feedback is irreplaceable to pick up on non-verbal cues, further cement a relationship, and the like. Further, the increased use of distributed and mobile teams and the need for people to have access to remote experts makes desktop videoconferencing even more valuable.

CL: A virtual desktop environment compounds an already difficult task – reliably delivering high-quality, multi-party videoconferencing without slowing down critical business applications or the corporate network.

When videoconferencing runs in a virtual desktop environment, USB webcam video is transmitted from one user’s device to the VDI server for compression and then sent via the Internet to the other videoconferencing user. At the same time, real-time video and audio coming into the VDI server must be decompressed before it is sent to the first user. Obviously, for a videoconference, this is an ongoing process. Unfortunately, this server-based audio/video compression and decompression requires excessive network bandwidth and places significant demands on the server’s CPU to compress large numbers of video streams.This server-based audio/video compression and decompression seriously limits scalability of video in VDI deployments.

Plus, delivering real-time audio and video over VDI protocols is typically not practical due to the impact of packet loss.