It’s been a Good Year for UC: UCIF Celebrates One Year Anniversary

Hi, my name is Matt Collier and I’m the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for LifeSize. Throughout my career I’ve focused primarily on the telecommunications and high-tech industries, and am now part of the Logitech/LifeSize team dedicated to helping people stay in better touch by bringing HD video communications to enterprises big and small worldwide.

One year ago today, Logitech/LifeSize became founding members of the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), a non-profit alliance of worldwide technology leaders working together to fully realize the potential of unified communications (UC).

Alongside founding members HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Polycom, and many more contributing participants, the common goal of the UCIF is to recognize interoperability based on open standards as one of the key requirements to drive UC further into today’s enterprises. Member companies collaborate to overcome existing interoperability barriers to widespread UC adoption and deliver a reliable and rich UC experience, with the goal of propelling worldwide enterprise UC adoption.

Now over 39 members strong, the UCIF is making good on its joint promise to further UC and make open standards and interoperability across enterprises, service providers and consumer clouds a reality. Click here to read about the successes of their first year.

On the Logitech/LifeSize front, our deep commitment to UC has never been stronger, making video communication truly accessible to everyone, everywhere. As most of you know, our products are designed to integrate with the technology you already have and with whatever technology your customers and partners have deployed. Here are a few of our milestones worth noting from the past year:

  • Today, Logitech is the only major video communications company working with both Microsoft and Skype:
    • Skype
      • We have a long history of working closely with Skype, both on the consumer and enterprise sides of our business. Only Logitech provides HD webcams and TV Cams certified to work with Skype HD, and LifeSize Passport is the only video conferencing endpoint to be plugged into Skype.
    • Microsoft
      • Microsoft is a close partner of Logitech’s. We’ve been working with Microsoft to certify our business-class Logitech and LifeSize products for Lync, and LifeSize recently achieved a milestone as the first company to be qualified to interoperate with Microsoft OCS.
      • This ongoing technology partnership ensures seamless interoperability for our users with Microsoft’s UC platform.
  • On the IP/PBX side, we have technology partnerships with companies like Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Shortel, Siemens, Asterisk and BroadSoft.

At our core, Logitech/LifeSize builds open, interoperable products for our consumer and enterprise customers that work with whatever technology they want it to. Close partnerships and open interoperability with widely deployed solutions are critical to us delivering on our vision for UC.

There will be much more to come in the coming year in UC for us and we look forward to continuing our work with the UCIF to drive changes that make technology truly seamless.

Author

Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for LifeSize