Avistar Communications Corporation, provider of unified visual communications solutions,  recently announced that Avistar C3 (News - Alert) Conference, which is its advanced conferencing and collaboration solution will now offer cloud-ready, HD-quality, multiparty videoconferencing at a much lower cost of similarly sized hardware-based multipoint control units (MCU).

In a release, Stephen Epstein, chief marketing officer, Avistar (News - Alert), said, "This breakthrough in multiparty videoconferencing processing, price performance and cloud enablement has largely been accomplished by the optimization of the Avistar C3 Conference media processing, the ability to use multiple servers to create a virtual single MCU and the continued performance improvements of off-the-shelf, standards- based server hardware. Our partners and clients can now deliver on-premise or on-demand multiparty videoconferencing capabilities to extremely large user and client bases, at a price point that historically was not achievable."

Avistar C3 Conference is currently the industry's only all-software, enterprise-class multiparty videoconferencing platform that interoperates seamlessly with standards-based room systems and desktops. A recent benchmark study of the Avistar C3 Conference solution using Intel Xeon E7-8837 processors in a Dell (News - Alert) PowerEdge R910 Rack Server, saw the Avistar solution deliver a 32-port, HD-quality, multiparty videoconferencing for a list price of $1,750 per port including the cost of all software licensing and hardware. In comparison, many of Avistar competitors have prices that range in between $4,000 to $7,000 per port for similar performance and features (including software and hardware).

Epstein went on to say that "The Avistar C3 Conference solution is a significant milestone for the videoconferencing industry as other MCU manufacturers will be forced to rethink their MCU strategies to remain competitive. Based on the greatly enhanced value and performance of our conferencing and collaboration solution, enterprise businesses and OEM vendors will benefit from these industry changes and the significant price and scalability improvements that the Avistar C3 Conference solution delivers."

A number of companies across a wide variety of industries rely on Avistar's desktop videoconferencing solutions for their daily business communications with deployments ranging in size from 30 to 35,000 users.