Citrix had announced earlier this year that they would be releasing a new video capability across GoToMeeting, GoToTraining and GoToWebinar that would support HD quality video. Will this be true HD video quality or simply standard video just streaming across an HD-enabled webcam? The anticipated launch date is March 2011...still waiting.
Like Cisco/WebEx Multi-Point Video (MPV) which has been in the market for over 4 years now, Citrix's new video capability plans to support up to 6 simultaneous video streams. (Citrix aims to support 1920px960p, though I have a feeling that their MPV capability will only support 640px480p. If it turns out it's 1920px960p one has to ask if their infrastructure will be able to handle the data intensive lead of true HD video. We'll see.) Citrix says the only required hardware will be a HD-capable video conferencing viewer. I do wonder if Citrix HDFaces will integrate with other true video-conferencing/telepresence solutions like Tandberg, the market leader, or Polycom and any other standard-based endpoints. Again, we'll see.
Though they are years late to the video collaboration market and had said that there was never a need for video collaboration in the SMB market, at least they now realize the importance of video collaboration. Better late than never.
It will be interesting to see how HDFaces does in the market only because their track record for spotting and capitalizing on market transitions has never been that great. They acquired VAPPS at the end of 2008 with the hopes of expanding their VoIP capabilities and following many of their competitors that had VoIP-enabled communications but ended up with an integration nightmare that I'm not sure they ever resolved. Today, I hear that their VoIP customers still contend with VoIP reliability issues and voice echoing.
As far as HDFaces is concerned, I think I read it best in a recent "Forrester Wave Report" by Forrester Research, re-summarized as, "Citrix has a pretty good products but lags on strategy."
As far as their customers are concerned, they are still waiting for video from Citrix...
Any updates on the new version?
Posted by: Cloud Solutions | February 27, 2011 at 10:12 AM