A Cisco representative saw my article about Polycom's announcement to support Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) and she thought I'd be interested in hearing Cisco's take. David Hsieh, vice president, emerging technologies, Cisco responded to this news announcement as follows:
"We are pleased to hear that Polycom is joining other companies in adopting the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP), the only open, multi-screen Telepresence interoperability protocol available today. TIP, originally developed by Cisco to enable multi-screen telepresence interoperability, was turned over to the IMTC (International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium) to be managed as an industry standard. It is not a Cisco proprietary protocol — it’s an open protocol available to anyone in the industry.We believe that there is market transition to the pervasive adoption of video, and customers want interoperability without compromise. The value for customers is to enable any-to-any multi-screen interoperability so that there are more people to talk to. This is helping customers leverage Metcalfe’s Law that builds the overall market. Cisco is committed to interoperability between Cisco TelePresence products and competitive multi-screen video communications devices, including Polycom, LifeSize and others."
Well amen to that! Cisco didn't always drink the open standards Kool-Aid, but they've come a long way. Finally, we're starting to see some interoperability with high-end video telepresence systems. Next, I'd like to see better interoperability with desktop IP video phones both in the enterprise and residential space (Packet8, Vonage). I've been griping about the videophone wars since 2004! Though there has been some progress.