Pexip Takes Complexity Out of HD Video Conferencing

Organizations of all sizes are clearly interested in the potential productivity benefits of video conferencing; it’s just that deploying it and managing it often make it more trouble than it’s worth.

Pexip, a startup company founded by engineers that formerly worked at Tandberg and Cisco, are looking to solve that problem with the recent launch of Pexip Infinity, a high-definition (HD) telepresence platform that can be deployed on top of virtual machines running on standard x86 servers.

Rather than requiring massive amounts of dedicated infrastructure, Pexip CEO Simen Teigre says Pexip Infinity is designed to deploy much like any other x86 application. After leaving Tandberg following its acquisition by Cisco in 2010, Teigre and the Pexip team of engineers began working on an HD telepresence platform from the ground up that IT organizations could treat as just another application.

That approach, says Teigre, makes it much easier to plug clients into the overall architecture, with Microsoft Lync, end points from Cisco, Polycom and LifeSize Communications along with the emerging WebRTC standard that enables video conferencing applications to run inside the browser among the first clients that Pexip Infinity will support. Ultimately, Teigre says the goal is to allow any client to access Pexip Infinity, which is particularly important in a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) world where IT organizations have less control over which client devices are attached to the network.

In recognition of that reality, Teigre is also making Pexip Infinity available with floating licenses that IT organizations can share across a maximum number of users logged into the application at any given time.

Pexip isn’t the only company pushing the adoption of HD telepresence as an application. As time goes on, the forces of Moore’s Law favor applications that don’t require any dedicated network infrastructure, which doesn’t tend to scale as easily. Obviously, there is no shortage of rivals in the HD telepresence space. But one of the primary reasons there hasn’t been broad adoption of HD telepresence systems is the cost of setting them up. The good news is that it’s starting to look like much of the cost and complexity associated with HD telepresence is being removed from the picture.