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Bill Efthimiou

Extending Unified Communications Based Multimedia Services Beyond The Enterprise

Since the invention of the telephone, we have expected an audio call to our dialled destination to work every time we dial. Today this same expectation continues, although the quality and reliability of the telephony service has vastly improved.

Video calling however, does not seem to have achieved the same ubiquitous use. There are many restraining factors, based around Enterprise security borders, protocol incompatibilities, addressing, the cost of video over ISDN, bandwidth requirements, ease of use, cost of video capable endpoints and the list goes on.

In more recent years, there has been phenomenal growth of Video calling offering the potential to reduce travel costs and enhance communications for productivity gain. AARNet is embarking on a new project for their Next Generation of Multimedia services aimed at creating an environment for the AARNet connected community which is flexible and easy to connect to.

Our vision is one where we will be able to place a call from a video capable endpoint at one Institution, to a video capable endpoint at another Institution and expect video to just work.

This new project will extend Multimedia applications via Enterprise Unified Communication platforms across heterogeneous networks. This work is not just about Unified Communications platforms alone, we seek to integrate in traditional room based video conferencing systems seamlessly into the same solution, thus creating a mass of video endpoints and unified communications solutions that AARNet connected Institutions can connect to.

This talk presents AARNet’s Multimedia solution, it will cover details on the challenges with the current environment, what is the solution about, how will it work, and who we have partnered with. The talk will provide a roadmap on developments, future services and seeks a robust discussion with the audience on what issues, opportunities and value these services can bring from the community perspective. 

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Bill Efthimiou's Biography
Bill Efthimiou joined AARNet in May of 2010 after having worked the previous 5 years as the Principal Consultant at a Sydney based Systems Integration organisation, designing, implementing and managing Unified Communications solutions and networks for businesses. Previous to this Bill worked for Cisco Systems Technical Assistance Centre in Sydney for 5 years. Here he spent much of his time troubleshooting and supporting some very large and complex customer networks. Bill's IT career spans over 20 year during which time he has held many System Administration and Consulting roles.

Since joining AARNET Bill has been busy designing and deploying Next Generation Multimedia Infrastructure services, based on SIP and H.323, using Session Border Controller technology from ACME Packet.