ConnectSolutions is excited to announce two important events in this, our 100th post on the company blog. The announcements include:
Acquisition of Xuggle
ConnectSolutions has completed the acquisition of Xuggle, a San Francisco company with incredible people and technology that will help us drive our vision of video-centric real-time collaboration. If you are interested in learning more about Xuggle’s people and technology, I encourage you to take a look here for an FAQ and supporting material. For the thousands of you working closely with Xuggler, the open source library for real-time video transcoding with Java, we are happy to announce continued support of the community to ensure you continue to build great things with the technology.
Real-Time Collaboration Platform
We are also very excited to announce the availability of the ConnectSolutions Real Time Collaboration platform. This platform has been purpose-built to provide private-cloud deployments of real-time collaboration technology, including support for one-to-one, group, and broadcast collaboration. You can learn more about this platform at the link above, as well as see a discussion we had this week with Paul Ritter, Vice President of IMS, on the subject of video-centric real-time collaboration, social media, and mobile platform delivery.
Telepresence. These systems are beautiful, exciting, and so insanely expensive that even Fortune 100 companies can’t afford to put them where their employees do their work.
I had to take a three hour train ride, each way, to get to our closest telepresence system and participate in the discussion!
I heard that the other day, and simply had to chuckle. Organizations are being sold on the “in-person” experience of telepresence, and the resulting increase in employee productivity while also reducing travel budgets. Yet, these systems are so expensive ($500,000.00 or more, per room, plus monthly recurring fees to support the network infrastructure and maintenance of these complex systems), that even the largest corporations can’t afford to put them in each of their regional offices. The scarcity of these systems in large corporations is rendering them counter-productive, and actually increasing the amount of travel for some employees like the one I referenced above. The fact that employees in the field, strategic partners, and customers can’t participate in these experiences is just further insult-to-injury.
For the bitter employee above, there is a happy ending to the story given their investments with ConnectSolutions and our desktop-based web collaboration tools. 
Happy New Year to all Acrobat Connect fans around the world.† We decided to start 2008 off in a big way, so† we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of our EMEA-based data-center for Acrobat Connect Professional!
This location sports all the same high performance, high-reliability features of our North America locations, bringing great experiences to Acrobat Connect users throughout EMEA.† When combined with our locations throughout North America, ConnectSolutions now extends its high-performance service infrastructure for organizations requiring global reach.
Benefits of this new service platform include:
- Instant On Deployment Capability:† Organizations can be up and running with their Acrobat Connect Professional investment in hours, not weeks.† This drives an immediate return-on-investment.
- High Performance Service Infrastructure:† Latency is a real-time communication experience killer, and when relying on resources across continents and oceans, you’ll come to expect it.† By deploying your Acrobat Connect Professional investment in close proximity to your end-users, you ensure low latency and a rich, engaging experience.
- Maximum Flexibility:† You retain the ability to deploy and configure Acrobat Connect Professional to the exact requirements of your business with QuickConnect.† Each customer is deployed with their own dedicated server resources, ensuring the most reliable, scalable, and extensible deployment available for Acrobat Connect Professional.
Whether your organization requires team collaboration, virtual classrooms, or large events, QuickConnect in EMEA provides a leading platform to deliver great experiences to your end-users.† We’re excited about this breakthrough for Acrobat Connect Professional customers, and look forward to working with you!
We’re excited to announce a partnership with WebAssist today.† We think the combination of our QuickConnect platform with WebAssist’s NutShell and integration services will provide a great combination for customers looking to deploy enterprise web conferencing, or move from stand-alone web conferencing to unified communication.
You can read the official press release here:
WebAssist and ConnectSolutions Broaden Adobe Connect Professional Reach through Partnership
