The communications solutions provider Pexip–based in Oslo, London, and New York–has announced the general availability of Pexip Infinity, a scalable software video platform. The idea behind the Infinity is to help companies to easily scale collaboration opportunities in a cost effective manner, which is becoming increasingly important for organizations to deal with the growing mobile work forces and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trends.

The Pexip Infinity software-based, virtualized solution provides personal meeting rooms for any number of users on video, voice and mobile with the flexibility to scale and deploy as required.

Since a large number of people prefer to work remotely, they need to work at home environment similar to that in the office. Pexip Infinity can be configured to use in two or more virtual machines in a setup that requires only 15 minutes. The software solution is scalable to support new video conferencing features and technologies such as H.265, SVC and WebRTC. Pexip Infinity’s platform is designed to efficiently use industry-standard servers from any vendor to provide high-quality, scalable and efficient conferencing.

“As the demand of employees to work anywhere, anytime increases, and as more companies adopt the trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), companies need to rethink IT decisions,” said Simen Teigre, chief executive officer and co-founder, Pexip. “Pexip Infinity is a revolutionary product that enables simple, affordable and high-quality video meetings for everyone, everywhere, offering users enterprise-quality virtual meeting rooms that meet the demands of the increasingly virtual workforce.”

Distributed, software-only, makes Pexip communication-as-a-service

DevOps editor Kyt Dotson took a moment to speak with Pexip executives about how the product works and where it sits in the global scheme of teleconference and telepresence products. In short, Pexip is a disruptive force because it “thinks in the cloud” using a model that distributes its network as much or as little as a client needs. As a result, the system can deliver dramatic bandwidth savings over traditional solutions.

“In traditional, monolithic MCU deployments, all participants connect into the same location. If the MCU is located in the US, the result is five high-definition calls across the Atlantic,” said Hakon Dahle, CTO and cofounder of Pexip. “With the Pexip distributed deployment model, two virtual machines are deployed, one in the US and one in Europe. Participants automatically connect to the closest conferencing node.”

According to Pexip these “nodes” can be held in datacenters across the globe and would most likely be housed near the major traffic locales of a client–such as a corporation with headquarters in England and the US might have a datacenter near London and one in Texas. Then, when the two headquarters, had a large conference call, one HQ would have all of its calls routed through Texas and the other through London; the end-result would be tighter bandwidth use to-and-from the datacenters with the major nodes coordinating the call–rather than so-many smaller connections weaving through the Internet between the two HQs.

Dahle explains, “The conferencing nodes are connected across a ‘virtual backplane’ allowing the current speaker to be forwarded in full resolution, and the other participants are scaled down ‘live thumbnails’, using very little bandwidth (about one tenth of a high definition call). This results in significantly reduced bandwidth across expensive WAN links, decreasing bandwidth consumption by as much as 90 percent.”

The result is that initially bandwidth savings would be low for fewer participants, but as that begins to rise the savings increase as more clients are wrapped into the “trunks.” In the end, scaling out from 3 to 20 produces a massive bandwidth savings, and then from 20 onwards would keep the same savings using the same node-based conference model.

All of this is handled by the Pexip networking protocols and with the software-only design it also means that clients don’t need to worry about installing special hardware anywhere.

Pexip Breaks the Barriers

First it was interoperability, which has been a problem in the industry for a long time, especially between room-based and software-based telepresence. Then virtualization was a key driver for the future evolution of the data center and for the ascent to the cloud services. The growing virtualization in video conferencing are pushing out expensive fixed capacity infrastructure solutions and opening up the floodgates of adoption, making videoconferencing affordable and scalable for all.

Today, millions of people take the mobile device and subsequently use them at work. According to the analysis, the number of conference program is greatly increased. This is evidenced by the programs such as Lync 2013, Vidyo and Polycom. The global market for video conferencing services is projected to reach $2.5 billion by 2018.

Video conferencing market leaders–like Cisco and Polycom–rely on hardware-based video bridging for multi-party video conferences. But personal video and BYOD have put a strain on the hardware products and they also can’t do virtualization. Pexip is first to develop a virtual software-based multi-point controller unit (MCU), which allows Infinity to be highly scalable and interoperable.

“Technology continues to drive change in the workplace. In the video conferencing space, the dynamics today revolve around the shift from hardware to software,” said Andrew W. Davis, founder and senior partner, Wainhouse Research. “Pexip’s solution fits well within the mainstream enterprise future–a virtualized solution that works in a truly distributed architecture, melds with common IT strategies and tools, and provides customers with unprecedented levels of interoperability and flexibility.”

Pexip is also focused on providing consistent same video solution on mobile devices. The company’s iOS app allows users to view the presentation and current participants on the call in addition to zoom and other features available on a mobile device.

Additionally, the platform is fully interoperable with all protocols and codexes and is future-proofed by modular architecture; include an easy to use management API; a distributed architecture to reduce WAN bandwidth consumption and redundancy and resilience capabilities.