One year ago, HP and others in the videoconferencing and Unified Communications industry formed the UCIF to begin to tackle issues of multi-vendor islands that were holding back UC. The group agreed to use existing standards, not form new ones, and to get started on some interoperability work.
Founders included HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Logitech / LifeSize, and Polycom.
The organization, now 39 members strong, represents all elements of the UC industry from networking to PBX systems, video to cloud services, everyone sharing a vision to enable interoperability of standards-based UC hardware and software across enterprises, service providers and consumer clouds.
Earlier this month, UCIF received great news when the UCIF USB Webcam recommendation was adopted by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) Video Work Group and submission of the completed specification was delivered to the USB-IF board. And while we’re extremely happy that we were able to complete this important task, there is more work to be done this year.
One major priority for 2011 is select test labs for our certification program. The Test & Certification task group will soon be issuing an RFP to equipment testing vendors in order to select a set of UCIF approved test labs. The selected test labs will report back to UCIF on the vendors’ ability to complete a testing profile. If successful, a UCIF mark will be issued for the tested companies’ products. Technical work is underway to create profiles that will be submitted to labs and used as the foundation for interoperability testing.
Additionally, UCIF has already created task groups for H.264/SVC Profile, Endpoint Provisioning, and USB Audio and study groups for Voice and Instant Messaging and Presence and we look forward to sharing more information about their progress in coming months.
For more information, please check out the resources below. Thanks to those who joined the UCIF this year and participated!!!
HP Visual Collaboration's own Chief Scientist Mark Gorzynski is the vice president of the UCIF board of directors. Shoot Mark a line here at "Virtually Speaking."
For more:
HP Visual Collaboration: http://www.hp.com/go/visual-collaboration/
UCIF Website: http://www.ucif.org/
UCIF Whitepaper: "UC, Driving the Next Step to Interoperability"
UCIF Blog: http://uciforum.wordpress.com/
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Mark and Karin
