Cisco TelePresence Intercompany

For many years, companies have sought better ways to involve customers, partners and suppliers in their collaborative interactions, without the burdensome requirements of scaling those interactions in person. The rationale for intercompany collaboration is clear—meetings with external groups can mean faster decisions, improved customer intimacy and cross-cultural communications and the ability to use scarce resources more efficiently or move products to market faster. Traditional videoconferencing using a video bridge—usually a service provided over a third-party network—is expensive and cumbersome, making this approach impractical and frustrating for many users.

Cisco TelePresence is usually used intercompany: you use your existing network to hold a virtual meeting with anyone you want, any time you want. Intercompany TelePresence offers several benefits:

Using your existing network and service provider connection to extend Cisco TelePresence meetings beyond your enterprise boundary, you can meet with your customers, suppliers and partners. You don't need to build and manage a separate overlay network at additional cost, and you don't need to deploy an outside connection that may not meet your security requirements.

This solution maintains the simplicity of Cisco TelePresence features such as one-button meeting initiation, allowing you to meet with others quickly and easily. Arranging meetings is as simple as making a phone call.

Intercompany TelePresence uses services within the network to guarantee quality of service (QoS) and bandwidth for a quality experience that securely and reliably spans different enterprise and service provider networks, using standards, encryption and your existing firewalls.

The Cisco TelePresence application is enabled for intercompany communications through three components:

Cisco TelePresence technology

Cisco TelePresence system with endpoint security for authentication and encryption

Cisco TelePresence Manager for directory and one-button scheduling services

Cisco TelePresence Multipoint Switch for easy and reliable meetings, incorporating participants in three or more locations into a single meeting

Enterprise network

Cisco Unified Communications Manager v. 5.1 or later

Enterprise network security: Cisco IOS firewall and Network Address Translation (NAT) traversal

Network management tools for network preassessment, provisioning, monitoring, fault detection and troubleshooting

Service provider network

Cisco TelePresence application-enabled network with high bandwidth and QoS

Cisco Session Border Controller (SBC) for interworked, policed, intercompany call routing

Network management tools for monitoring, fault detection and troubleshooting

Billing and mediation capabilities

There are two different intercompany models:

Service Provider Exchange Model

All TelePresence sessions destined for a different enterprise go to the service provider’s TelePresence exchange. The terminating enterprise may or may not be serviced by the same service provider.

Figure 1:

Business-to-Business TelePresence – SP Exchange model

Extranet Model

Allows for creating a small, private user group between two or more enterprise customers without requiring intercompany TelePresence routing functions by the service provider.

Figure 2:

Business-to-business TelePresence – Extranet model

Suitable for small deployments in an environment where enterprise customers who want to create a user group have existing relationships between enterprises. This model still requires QoS-enabled IP infrastructure to carry TelePresence traffic, in order to get a TelePresence-immersive experience.

Cisco TelePresence Interoperability

Usually conversations one-on-one aren't enough, and we want to have more people involved in one session – a multipoint TelePresence session. What do we need to be able to do that? A Cisco TelePresence multipoint switch (CTMS) is a purpose-built multipoint appliance developed to address multipoint requirements for Cisco TelePresence. In combination with the Cisco TelePresence Manager (CTS-Manager), CTMS provides a scalable multipoint solution for a Cisco TelePresence network of any size. CTMS provides a very scalable architecture, supporting up to 48 simultaneous table segments. (A table segment is a display and camera on any CTS system.) Unlike videoconferencing solutions that require you and your contacts to use the same private network overlaid on top of your network, the intercompany Cisco TelePresence solution takes advantage of your existing enterprise network and connections from service providers.

Great – now we have intercompany TelePresence, even with multipoint, but what if that isn't enough? What if we already have an older videoconferencing system in our network? Or more of them?

Figure 3:

Multiple video endpoints

To connect different video standalone endpoints or software-based clients on different operating systems into TelePresence sessions, you need interoperability.

Interoperability (interop) with non-TelePresence systems is provided by the CTMS and Cisco Unified Videoconferencing MCU (CUVC). This offering extends the immersive experience beyond Cisco TelePresence to virtually all standard-definition (SD) and high-definition (HD) videoconferencing systems and other business video applications and technologies.

All Cisco TelePresence meetings require non-TelePresence participants to be terminated on a CTMS, even if the meeting is between one TelePresence system and one videoconferencing system. Non-TelePresence interoperability is achieved by cascading a TelePresence meeting on the CTMS to a meeting on the CUVC, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4:

TelePresence interoperability

This architecture allows existing videoconferencing endpoints to participate in TelePresence meetings with little or no change to the existing videoconferencing infrastructure. Interop meetings are supported for static or scheduled meetings on the CTMS. From a TelePresence user's perspective, initiating the meeting is no different from a standard point-to-point or multipoint meeting. The user enters the room, uses the “One Button to Push” entry on the 7975 touch screen, and the call is started. Once the first TelePresence room dials into the meeting, the CTMS automatically initiates the cascade link between the CTMS and the CUVC.

Non-TelePresence endpoints manually dial the CUVC conference ID to join the meeting. From the CTMS perspective, the CUVC is a single-screen TelePresence system that is switched into and out of the left segment of any three-screen TelePresence system (as shown earlier in Figure 4). Audio from the CUVC is mixed by the CTMS and continuously sent to all CTS endpoints. As soon as the CUVC is deemed the active speaker for the meeting, the CTMS switches the CUVC’s video to all TelePresence systems, which is displayed in the left segment of all three-screen TelePresence systems. The CUVC sees the CTMS as just another video endpoint capable of communicating using Common Intermediate Format (CIF) video and G.711 audio. The CTMS does not transcode video and audio received from CTS endpoints; instead, all CTS endpoints send a copy of their audio in G.711 format, and only the active segment for the meeting sends a copy of its 1080p video in CIF. The CTMS then mixes the G.711 audio from all CTS endpoints and switches the mixed G.711 audio and CIF video (from the active CTS segment) to the CUVC.

Here are two examples of interoperability user experiences – Figure 5 shows the quality of a call into TelePresence from a Cisco 7985G IP phone.

Figure 5:

SD interoperability – Cisco 7985 with CIF quality

A user experience with a high-definition non-TelePresence endpoint is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6:

High-definition quality

Cisco TelePresence interoperability helps you to realize the benefits of the Cisco TelePresence application by doing the following:

Allowing any Cisco TelePresence endpoint to be in the same call with up to 120 SD or 30 HD videoconferencing endpoints.

Providing standards-based operation, with support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), H.264, G.711 and G.722 and Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP): any standards-based H.323, SIP, or Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP) videoconferencing endpoint will interoperate with the Cisco TelePresence system. Cisco TelePresence systems also interoperate with nonstandard endpoints such as Microsoft Office Communicator.

Enabling Cisco TelePresence meetings to be extended to Cisco WebEx Meeting Center.

Preserving the Cisco TelePresence experience by lowering video resolution to 720p when interoperating with HD videoconferencing systems.

Providing availability of one-button meeting start to all Cisco TelePresence endpoints in meetings.

Offering a simple addition to existing Cisco TelePresence deployments: no change to endpoints, procedures, gatekeepers or multipoint, and no retraining of users is required.

Providing multipoint support for up to 48 Cisco TelePresence rooms in a single meeting, or 47 with videoconferencing joining: videoconferencing endpoints can all connect over a single multipoint Cisco TelePresence stream, so a meeting can support more users in more places.

Summary

With interoperability, intercompany and other goodies, TelePresence becomes a very powerful and usable application. For today, I'll stop here, but there is plenty left to discuss: TelePresence recording, a lot more collaboration etc. – let's keep some for the upcoming articles.