According to RadiSys (News - Alert) officials, it’s “an opportune time for up-and-coming conferencing service providers (CSPs) to jump into conferencing products based on VoIP architectures.” They point out that early adopters have demonstrated the viability and cost-efficiencies of these technologies in large hosted conferencing deployments.

Indeed, as a recent white paper produced by RadiSys, “Integrated Conferencing Solutions: For Smaller Or Emerging Market Collaboration Service Providers” makes clear, smaller and emerging market collaboration service providers are looking for easy-to-use, scalable and flexible conferencing products that support all the necessary functionality.

“These needs, previously divided into six categories, are all addressed by the RadiSys Integrated Conferencing Solution based on modern VoIP technology,” the paper explains. For example, cost – “the modularity and high port density of IP-based conferencing components helps the RadiSys offering reduce the cost per port to about half that of a typical TDM bridge. It’s also possible to implement SIP Peering to take advantage of the lowest available long distance costs. In addition, CSPs can start with a relatively small, low-cost option.”

Scalability is another prime concern for smaller firms, and the RadiSys Integrated Conferencing Solution can be deployed on a single 1RU Linux server, providing an economical starter system for lab trials or small deployments. However, the paper says, “the modularity of the architecture also allows the solution to scale to large, multi-site distributed systems supporting 50,000 or more simultaneous calls,” meaning CSPs can start small and grow.

RadiSys officials see the transition away from legacy TDM conferencing bridges toward Next Generation Network (NGN) audio conferencing as presenting “new opportunities for CSPs,” since it gives them “more control over the expenditures, size and feature-mix of their conferencing systems, while dramatically lowering cost per port.”

The white paper does a good job describing the equipment and features new conferencing service providers need to get started, no matter how small they may be starting out.