The following interview was conducted last Thursday. Both the transcript and audio can be found below. (You may also be interested in the pre-conference interview with GIPS before the debut European conference last October, here)
Lee: Hey good afternoon; it's Lee Dryburgh, Founder of the Emerging Communications Conference. Today, I'm pleased to speak with Global IP Solutions again. Today, I have Jan and Joyce, and if I ask you Jan; what is it you do over there at Global IP Solutions?
Jan: Lee, good to talk to you. I'm the V.P. of Engineering at GIPS. I'm responsible for the development of our products.
Lee: We have Joyce again. It's always good to hear from you. What is it you're doing there?
Joyce: Good to speak to you again, Lee. I'm the V.P. of Marketing here. I run all of the products and out-bound communications for Global IP Solutions.
Lee: Fantastic, I'm really happy to say that you guys - guy and lady - kindly not only sponsored America 2009, but you also kindly supported the debut European conference last year. I see that you have sponsored America 2010. Just briefly, why have you decided to sponsor again?
Joyce: I think we've given you a lot of feedback directly, but we've actually consistently found that eComm is fairly unique. We like the content. It's less emphasis on promotion or sales pitch, and much more on strategic content and kind of staying at the forefront of innovation and what's going on out there in the marketplace. Conferences like this are extremely important for us, as a company that is in line with what other entrepreneurs and companies and people in this space are doing. We feel it's important for us to sponsor, as well as contribute, and learn from the conferences that we attend. You're certainly doing a bang-up job there.
Lee: Thank you for the kind words, Joyce. It's greatly appreciated. Sponsors do pay for the majority of the event, so it's needed. We have a lot of great innovators but it's even better when we have innovators who put something in the pot and make the community available to everybody. Again, I appreciate it. I think it will be beneficial, before I find out what you're up to now, to just do a quick recap of what Global IP Solutions does?
Joyce: We actually enablers of real-time voice and video. If you think about HD voice and video conferencing or video chat, we don't actually develop the applications. But think of us as kind of an extension of the core engineering that develops the technology to make all this work. We work with various service providers, application developers, hardware manufacturers, and we provide what's called the "media processing capabilities" that is usually embedded within these various things that people use, the applications that people will use.
Lee: So, it's about saving time to market and reducing risk?
Lee: Absolutely, and providing high-quality voice and video over IP networks; that's exactly right.
Lee: Are you allowed to share any client names?
Lee: Sure, our customers include enterprise customer providers like Cisco, Avaya, IBM. We have consumer-based solutions in the Internet space like Google, Yahoo. We work with mobile applications like Nimbuzz, so it's really a big breadth of customers.
Lee: That sounds great. I don't think I've asked you that before. You have a new product out. I was looking at your website the other day and I saw VideoEngine for the iPhone. Can you tell me something about that?
Joyce: We just announced the VideoEngine for the iPhone. We were actually the first to launch the enabling for Voice over IP voice capabilities for the iPhone, and we kind of did that again by enabling one-way video this time. I think that as we've seen and talked to our customers, and looked at the market, there is a lot of talk about extending, whether it be collaboration or video conferencing to the mobile device. Certainly, with the devices like iPhone, and Android actually, a lot of these capabilities are feasible with 3G, 4G, and so forth.
We looked at the uptake and what would be a potential to do this on the iPhone. Certainly, because of a lack of a front-facing camera we did pause and ask if this would be worth it. Looking at the market, one way certainly has a lot of value there. One could imagine seeing a GoToMeeting or WebEx kind of online session where you can take your mobile device and look at the actual slides that are being presented or talked about; or with one way you would be able to see the conference video chat speaker, although they would not actually be seeing you.
It certainly has its benefits. I think for the Android, which is something we're in the midst of announcing now, which we'll give you a sneak preview on, we've definitely seen the development community embrace that platform so we're actually excited for that to happen. Certainly, when a front-facing camera becomes available in the States, we will offer the two-way capability as well.
Lee: So you're offering the facilities or what we might call frameworks to overcome the challenges of IP delivery, the public Internet as a network to overcome that for the most difficult media type, which is real time, specifically voice and video. Then you've got these great new platforms - I almost used the phrase "next generation", which I can't take after a decade of it, but exciting platforms, Android and iPhone. You're giving people these frameworks to overcome obstacles, and on these exciting platforms. What you're really doing is enabling others to innovate?
Lee: Absolutely
Lee: The 2009 America conference, you spoke about "overcoming the challenges for Voice over IP on iPhone" Later in the year, when we decided to have the debut European version, in Amsterdam, Jan spoke about "scalable video coding," SVC. What is the connection between SVC and GIPS? Is this not just a technology?
Jan: SVC is a new technology to offer a very scalable video solution that works pretty much everywhere, on every device. It's very important in the mobile space, where you have small screens, tough networks, and all that. The connection with GIPS is that H.264 SVC is standardized by the ITU, but it needs to be implemented in a good way and that's where we get into the picture. There is almost no implementations of this standard yet, and we are really at the forefront to deliver high-quality solution that enables people to offer the quality that SVC promises.
Lee: So SVC is an ITU standardized - I was almost going to say "protocol", it's an ITU standard? You've got an implementation of it that others can license and built upon. Who do you think would most likely look at that as a customer base? Is this operator, handset manufacturers, or more 2.0 smaller-scale startups, or a mixture?
Jan: It's really all of them, if you think about it. We have seen SVC gain interest from the very largest video conference providers as well as peer-to-peer video chat. There is no question that the technology has a lot of benefits because of its efficiency and high quality capabilities.
Lee: What does SVC offer me? Why should I get excited about SVC?
Jan: It offers a very simple way, and very scalable way of the exact quality level, the best quality you can expect on a certain device. For example, different devices in one conference might be a mobile device, a PC, and a telepresence solution. Each of those have very different capabilities in terms of resolution and typical bandwidth they can support.
What SVC does is provide, in one stream, a scalable stream so you can, if you use all the pieces that are in the video stream, you might get the HD quality that the telepresence can display, while displaying on the mobile device where you have a really small screen and limited bandwidth, then you just scale off certain parts of the bit stream and you can send that to the mobile. This makes it very easy to offer exactly what everybody wants, and adapt to the needs of the end users or end devices at the same time as it offers something extremely important in these challenges networks, and that's robustness against the networks. There are issues in terms of bandwidth limitations, but also the packets are lost or get delayed. SVC inherently has a lot of support to mitigate those effects. This is why the end users will see a great advantage of this because they'll get the best possible quality, regardless of what device they're on or what network they're on.
Lee: Back five years ago, I was working on the first video mobile conferencing trials. We could have five mobile video callers, two PC-based callers. It would automatically distribute to everybody using a multimedia conferencing unit. What is the difference now in 2010 compared to then, i.e. why not use an MCU?
Jan: That's a very good question. The main difference is the MCU can pretty much do the same things, but it takes more horsepower, it's less flexible so you can't give everybody exactly what they want. You will typically have to limit yourself a bit more to three scenarios if you have ten participants. You cannot group them into three different scenarios, and each of those three will get the same experience - lower quality than what you could expect otherwise. But back to the complexity, it's not very scalable with MCU. As you said, each MCU can handle maybe five to ten people so you need a ton of those if you want to handle many conferences, or really big conferences.
Lee: You don't mean active participants. You just mean twenty company people on a call and maybe five active participants?
Jan: : Yes, and I think in unified communication, this is the usage scenario that is gaining a lot of interest, that your desktop and mobile device can participate in these meetings. There will then be a lot of less active users. You have a few very active, but you can also have a lot of users that are not as active, and easily support that without any additional complexity in the network.
Lee: I like the sound of that because when I was working on the mobile video conferencing trials in 2005, we actually did use it internally, because it meant you weren't constrained to a desk at a certain time and place to participate in company virtual meetings. I remember one case, on the way to the airport, participating in a video conference from the cell phone.
Do you think you're going to see people build upon video for the first time, in more of a conferencing manner? Do you see that on the horizon? Video is obviously building but do you think it will become more mainstream now that we don't need to have MCUs? Do you think you'll have smaller or more agile players coming in there and developing innovative applications?
Joyce: Absolutely, I think we're actually seeing that already. If you look at majority of business users today, they use some kind of video system, whether it be a corporate system, a desktop system, even applications like Skype and Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger. These are very common today. There is no question that the extension to the mobile device will only help drive more usage of it.
Lee: It will be exciting to see what people will do with this VideoEngine, what innovations will come out of it, so it's nice that you've spent the past year doing R&D on that, and then offer us a framework to speed others up and reduce their costs. Last year you spoke about overcoming the obstacles in terms of audio. This year I believe your talk is going to be about overcoming video obstacles, is that correct?
Jan: Yes, that's correct. We talked about audio last time and now video. Of course, a lot of the obstacles are the same, just more challenging in terms of video. Video requires more CPU, more bandwidth, and needs the screen - not only the audio capabilities of the device. On these challenging but very useful small devices, you need to be able to overcome these limitations in a way that will offer a really good experience. As we mentioned, SVC is one way of helping that happen. But you also have to handle a lot of other issues, and that's where we come in. By handling those issues for the developers, so they don't have to take care of that, and they can innovate on top of that.
Lee: I have this feeling that you're going to see SVC being embedded in consumer electronics. Would you agree?
Jan: : Do you mean as in TV and -
Lee: Yes, generally more consumer electronics will naturally embed both voice and video. On the video side, SVC will be pretty much a standard?
Jan: I agree that's where we're going. As you point out there, voice and video are not so much technologies in themselves, they're something that gets integrated into a total solution in some way, like in gaming and collaboration, etc. That is something that is gaining more and more momentum, which means it will be put in more end devices where it makes sense. Definitely, SVC is very well designed to fit in those scenarios.
Lee: With consumer electronics, you tend to have limited processors, storage, etc. It seems that the framework idea that GIPS offers, coupled with a nice standard like H.264 seems to be a winning formula. It would seem to me that you're likely to not only gain customers in a mobile arena, as more and more phones become Android or iPhone based, but you're likely to see some market share in the consumer electronic space.
Joyce: There is no question; our customers are headed in that direction. I think one of the key things is that H.264 in general provides the interoperability where you certainly have various devices and services being able to communicate with one another.
Lee: Jan, if I can ask you in a bullet-point fashion, what are the video challenges? You mentioned limited processor and things like this. There are surely other issues, like syncing of the voice and video, right?
Jan: Sure, in order to provide the best video experience, what we always start with is great audio. Video experience is never good if the audio isn't good, so that's where you start. HD Voice and a really high quality voice is kind of the first thing.
Then you need to couple the video and voice together, in terms of lip synchronization, so there is no annoying difference in when you receive the voice in the video. That's very challenging when you have challenging networks, so that's something that you have to figure out how to work in those scenarios.
The other thing that is important here between voice and video is to share the bandwidth in the best possible way, back to what I said; high voice quality is important, so you can't use all the bandwidth that is available if it's limited to only video use because then the audio quality degrades.
Finding the perfect match there, to get the best experience, that is another challenge in terms of delivering high quality in tough scenarios.
Then, the device - again, we talked about CPU, screen, so it's a small screen. The camera might be backwards facing but even when it gets frontward facing, you have to handle the fact that there are a lot of background issues on both voice and video because you are moving around. There can be things like lightening that is very unpleasant for the other side, and you need to process those things.
Then the last part again is the network. It's not only bandwidth limited, typically, the network out to the mobile, but it's also changing rapidly and there is a big chance, even if it's WiFi, but even more if it's 3D or something, that there are packet loss or long delays. Those are challenges that need to be overcome.
We worked very hard on overcoming these challenges and we believe that we have gotten so far that you can really offer a very high-quality solution, based on what we offer. Then it's up to the developers to put the innovative spin on that to applications people really want to use.
Lee: That's really great to hear. I'd like to finish off here by something else which popped into my mind, consumer electronics; I see it getting a lot more embedded in terms of real time capabilities embedded in them, but 4G - I've been looking at 4G development. You're seeing the voice and any services really becoming decoupled from the operator, and particularly in 4G. It's quite surprising, the decoupling of voice to the actual transport. Have you been looking at 4G as a large market opportunity for yourselves?
Jan: Absolutely, as a technology it definitely solves a lot of our issues and makes it easier for us to offer something, or for our customers to offer something that is ubiquitous and works on every device and in every network. It's a great thing that the voice is decoupled and that we get the whole bandwidth available to our applications. In 3G, if you're using it a lot, it's dedicated to the regular cellular voice. Here, you dedicate the whole length to whatever IP solution you want to offer. That is obviously very attractive to our type of solutions, and we are looking forward to seeing more deployments on the 4G side.
Lee: Excellent. Over the last year or so, I've come to understand more and more what GIPS is offering and now I get the sense with consumer electronics, that it has good trajectory for what GIPS offers. After the last eComm show in Europe, I was very surprised at how voice etc. had become decoupled from the transport, i.e. the horizontal market. It would seem to again position GIPS to a good position looking forward.
I am excited about what you're doing. I would like to see some of what your clients are offering later on, particularly using the video engine. For now, I'm going to need to draw this to a close and keep it a bit shorter than usual, so I would like to thank you both for your time and for letting us know - to give us a GIPS update and what GIPS is doing. I very much appreciate it.
Lee: Thank you Lee.
Jan: Thanks Lee.
Lee: Take care.
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