If you are looking for a new way to do enterprise video conferencing that marries the quality, standards support and management features missing from Skype and its ilk, take a look at today’s announcement from Logitech with its ClearSea service.
To get started, the service is free for up to three users, five minutes per call. Fee-based plans start at $29 per month. There is a very broad mobile device support that allows you to connect any iOS (including the v5 phones announced today by Apple) and many different Android phones and tablets to room-based teleconferencing systems using H.323 or SIP standards such as Cisco’s or Polycom’s room systems. Prior to this announcement, you either had to use proprietary video conferencing software or more consumer-grand offerings such as Skype with spotty video calling quality.
ClearSea offers better endpoint management and reporting along with quality controls and encryption built-in.
All the clients are free, but to connect them you can either use their cloud-based service or purchase a server and install inside your firewall. The latter goes for an initial price for $8000 for the software alone, depending on the number of users you want to support. They have several customers who have deployed configurations with a 100 concurrent callers on a single server, for example.
Logitech purchased Mirial this past summer and this is the first result of that integration to its LifeSize division.
