One of our audio/video integration vendors, IVCI, has begun reselling a service from Blue Jeans Networks as a service called “MVE” to allow Skype participants to join into conferences with standards based video conferences. We’ve used the service and can report that it works quite well. Unfortunately there is no pay-per-use model at this time, only an annual contract which after paid can be canceled with 30 days notice and the balance refunded. Since we can generally have Duke OIT’s conferencing services customers install Cisco Movi (which is currently available free to participating schools and departments for participation in video conferences), we do not believe there would be enough demand to support the minimum 1000 participant/minutes per month. The only advantage we see is not having your participants install another software application. So far, we’ve deployed Movi to over 250 customers with minimal complaints about the difficulty of installing or incompatibility of Cisco Movi.
All that said, if you have a business need to bring in Skype users that can’t be satisfied by Cisco Movi, feel free to email us at oit-its-info at duke.edu and we’d be happy to meet with you and your IT team to discuss further.
If you’d like more information on the Cisco Movi program at Duke, please visit the OIT website.
