I have always felt that one of the last remaining hurdles that SightSpeed faced in the past to widespread adoption of SightSpeed for Business was the nagging issue of NAT and Firewall traversal, especially in hotel and multi-stage router and access point deployments that we would always seem to run into at the most inopportune times. Sure from their offices to my home office and to then CEO Peter Csathy’s home office it all worked, but when I would change into Road Warrior mode the hurdle that would arise when you last needed it to appear, like Mr. Murphy, was that pesky pest of IP packet traffic, NAT traversal.
In my heart I knew that once SightSpeed crossed that hurdle, their SightSpeed for Business product could be the best bet for small business as dollar for dollar nothing beats it. Even now, given that Skype’s multiparty play is maxed at five as an offering it offers four less end points and thus SightSpeed, with now 9 users-ala the Hollywood Squares- was hands down the better option as their video to this day remains the most pristine and sharp and is so good it’s just short of moving upstream to the far more expensive box based video conferencing solutions on the market today, and far simpler to deploy. You simply install the software and off you go. No IT guy required.
Well, it looks like that problem is going to go away, as SightSpeed’s parent, Logitech earlier this month acquired Paradial.
We looked at a variety of SMB video options a few months ago and settled on Acrobat Connect. It bundles web conferencing with up to 16 people in a video session for a fairly low price. The other option we really liked were some of the hosted services based on Vidyo’s platform given SVC’s ability to support HD over any Internet connection.