Telecosm - Ike Elliott

Interview: Envysion's Matt Steinfort and Rob Hagens

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing two leaders from one of the up-and-coming Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies here in the Boulder, Colorado area: Envysion.  I was lucky to get to work with both Matt Steinfort (Envysion's CEO) and Rob Hagens (CTO) while we worked at Level 3 Communications.  Since leaving Level 3, Matt and Rob and the Envysion team (including Darren Loher, another outstanding engineer from Level 3) have been doing some pretty innovative work around video services on the Internet.  But I've said enough...let's let Matt and Rob tell the story:

1. What does Envysion do?

Steinfort: Envysion provides Managed Video as a Service (MVaaS) to customers to enable them to better understand and manage their numerous remote locations.  Said in plainer English, we provide a video service that gives people access to live and recorded video in a very simple and scalable way so that they can understand what is going on in their locations, learn from it, and improve the way that they operate.

2. What is Envysion’s unique competitive advantage?

Steinfort: We’ve got a number of competitive advantages.  Among the most compelling of these are the ease of use and scalability of our service.  There are a lot of companies out there today that tout video as a great operational improvement tool, but their solutions were designed to work in a single site at a time and to be used by someone in IT or security.  Our solution is the only enterprise grade video service that works easily within the constraints of large customers’ network and IT capabilities and is easy enough to use that everyone from the CEO to a brand new marketing intern could use it.

3. How much bandwidth does a typical Envysion video stream use? 

Hagens: There is not a black and white answer to this because you have to factor both quality and resolution into the equation. Quality is a measure of how lossy the compression algorithm is run at. You could run 10 fps at low quality over 50Kbps, but the picture would look "pixilated" or "blocky".

Resolution is a measure of the total number of pixels that are used to render the image. Resolution in the video world is typically described as the number of pixels used horizontally and vertically. Today we support 320 by 240 resolution. DVD quality is typically 720 by 480. That is 4 times as many pixels as 320 by 240 which would drive much higher bandwidth.

A typical camera at 10 frames per second, 320 by 240 resolution would consume about 150Kbps with good quality. Envysion video is always recorded at a specific resolution, frame rate and quality. However, because of all the complexity described above, Envysion has built a dynamic bandwidth adjustment into its streaming technology. When viewing the video remotely, the system will dynamically adjust the bandwidth consumed in order to "fit" within the Internet access connection being used by the customer. This happens automatically without any customer intervention. This is a good example of how Envysion Video "just works better" across the Internet.

Steinfort: That's one of our key differentiators, our ability to dynamically throttle the amount of bandwidth that we use to stream video based on what is available.  It enables us to work on low speed connections such as ISDN and satellite, and ensures we don’t ever clog the networks that are also being used for mission critical applications (like credit cards processing).

(Please click the continuation link below for the rest of the interview)

Telecosm Interview: David Bryan on Peer to Peer Technology

I am pleased that David Bryan agreed to be interviewed for the first of what I hope will be a regular feature on the Telecosm blog: interviews!  I am very interested in peer to peer technology and its many applications, and was thrilled when David agreed to help me launch this part of the blog.  David Bryan wears two very big hats:

• He is Chief Executive Officer of Sipeerior Technologies, a leading provider of standards-based, OEM software solutions designed to enable serverless implementations of real-time communications applications.
• He is co-chair of the Peer-to-Peer Session Initiation Protocol (P2PSIP) working group at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the standards-making group for the Internet. 

I am particularly pleased the David was able to take some time for the interview from his busy schedule, as there is an IETF meeting underway in Philadelphia this week. 

IKE:  Peer-to-peer file-sharing applications such as BitTorrent get a lot of press, so when people hear peer-to-peer they could be excused for thinking only about file-sharing.  What other applications could be enabled by peer-to-peer technology?

DAVID: I think that is a great question. Peer-to-Peer is one of those things where people not only immediately think file-sharing, but immediately think music piracy too, which is really unfortunate. Peer-to-Peer is a technology, in the same way that client-server – the mechanism used for everything from email to web servers – is a technology. I think as people get their heads around peer-to-peer you will see it used in more and more places. It really is just a way to take advantage of the tremendously fat pipes we have in place to our homes, and the powerful devices we have connected to those. It's a great way to leverage that power, for companies to offer services without the need for large data centers, and to be "green" while doing it, since the end device is being fully utilized.

People also think about only large, Internet-scale communities connected by P2P. I think that you will see many of these, but will also see P2P being used within an enterprise or even a home. Communications, in the form of VoIP or IM is obviously one area where this is very attractive. Small office systems can be server-less, and incorporate all the wonderful features that large office systems have today, such as IM and presence. These systems are running today. Consumer electronics is another area where you will see P2P being used. Some of this looks like file sharing – video on demand content shared between set-top boxes for example, but it can also be used to enable features such as communications between users of consumer devices or for gaming. Imagine being part of a community of users with digital home hubs, where I can post content, look at others’ content, and then communicate and notate their content. Today that would require a big back-end commitment from the vendor. With P2P, much of that can be pushed to the edge.

IKE: Why is SIPeerior’s technology important?

DAVID: I think there are number of reasons what we are doing is really unique and important. We have focused on working on a standards-based approach to P2P. One of the problems P2P has today is that many of the applications that employ the technology are either "black" or at least "grey" in the eyes of ISPs and system administrators. They may not want to allow BitTorrent or Skype traffic on their networks. A big part of this is that it the technology isn't transparent. They don't know what they are dealing with. Similarly, it won't interface with existing devices, and it won't usually operate in a stand-alone, enterprise way.

What we have done is worked since day one to promote and open standard for peer-to-peer (P2P), and in particular P2PSIP. We are working to promote a documented, open standard for the P2P part, and using established, well known mechanisms for call signaling (SIP), NAT traversal (ICE), encryption (DTLS), etc. We offer software for building generic P2P applications, as well as very specialized software for P2PSIP. Both are based on open specifications, and "play nice" with other Internet applications. Our VoIP side products are SIP compliant in the sense that you can take a cluster of P2PSIP phones and connect in a few off the shelf SIP phones, gateways, or even servers if you want a hybrid architecture. You can do that with devices based on SIPeerior's technology today. I think the approach of being standards-based for both the P2P and the call portion is really unique.

We’ve also really focused on reliability and redundancy. Our customers aren’t building a file-sharing network where downtime is acceptable. They need things to work in real-time, and P2P can be a very good way to handle reliability, when done correctly, and I think that is what we bring to the table – a robust, embeddable software library that is open and allows vendors to eliminate their servers.