Cisco TelePresence Conductor Partner Q&A
Overview
1. What is the Cisco TelePresence® Conductor?
Cisco TelePresence Conductor helps simplify multiparty video communications and therefore accelerate
the adoption of Cisco TelePresence.
2. What does Cisco TelePresence Conductor do?
An orchestra could not perform without a conductor, even if the individual musicians knew their parts
flawlessly. Even when conferencing components are working perfectly, it is often difficult to manage
provisioning and access. Cisco TelePresence Conductor allows those components to work together in
perfect harmony. Cisco TelePresence Conductor intelligently assigns the right conferencing resource for
each conference for the best possible experience and supports devices ranging from the desktop all of the
way to immersive rooms.
There is a great video showing the core capabilities provided by Cisco TelePresence Conductor, along with
some sample use cases, here:
Cisco TelePresence Conductor video
3. How did you manage multipoint conferencing before Cisco TelePresence Conductor?
Personal video devices are on the rise, resulting in an increase in ad hoc and rendezvous (often referred to
as meet-me) conferencing, in addition to traditional scheduled conferencing. Previously, we relied on Cisco
TelePresence Video Communication Server (VCS) and Cisco TelePresence Management Suite (TMS) to
optimize multipoint conferencing. Cisco TelePresence Conductor will vastly simplify the administration and
provisioning of conferencing services and provide a simple, natural experience for users when they initiate
or access conferences.
4. Why is another device needed on top of the multipoint control units (MCUs) to manage
conferencing?
With Cisco TelePresence Conductor, conference resources are pooled so that the most appropriate MCU
can be selected to host each new conference. This can be based on user service-level entitlement (for
example, should they get a standard-definition or high-definition (HD) experience?), geographic location,
language preference, and other factors. TelePresence Conductor helps ensure optimum resource
availability and utilization.
5. What are the customer benefits?
The primary business benefits are:
•
Simplicity: Every employee has an email address and phone number. Now everyone can also get a
personal conference ID (number or URI).
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•
Reliability: Conferences are always available. The resilient architecture helps ensure uptime even if
individual MCUs or TelePresence Conductors are taken out of service.
•
Scale: Conferences can have 3 participants, 40 participants, 100 participants, 1000 participants—it
doesn’t matter;; Cisco TelePresence Conductor makes it happen. •
Consistency: A personalized experience is provided for all conferences.
More specifically, conference participants benefit from simple conference initiation and access, and
administrators benefit from simplified conference provisioning and administration.
6. What’s new in Cisco TelePresence Conductor?
Cisco TelePresence Conductor is now available as a virtualized application that can run on a Cisco UCS®
platform or on spec-based third-party hardware in addition to the existing appliance.
The key features and capacity of virtualized Cisco TelePresence Conductor remain the same as in the
appliance-based Cisco TelePresence Conductor:
•
Knowledge of all available conferencing components and their capabilities
•
A traffic director to help ensure intelligent conference placement
•
Flexible, extensible conferencing
•
Personalization to satisfy user preferences
•
Simple, natural conferencing
7. What are the benefits of Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized?
The key benefits of Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized are the ability to:
•
Consolidate multiple appliances to reduce costs
•
Improve business continuity and service availability with live TelePresence Conductor virtual
machine (VM) migrations
•
Reduce deployment times for new TelePresence Conductor VMs
8. Is there any difference between virtualized and appliance-based Cisco TelePresence
Conductor?
The key features and capacity of virtualized Conductor remain exactly the same as in the appliance-based
Conductor. The administrator can implement Cisco TelePresence Conductor as either an appliance or a
virtualized application to meet the needs of the organization.
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Sales Information
1. When will the Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized application be available to order?
Cisco TelePresence Conductor Virtualized orderability and general availability is planned for
September/October 2012. Cisco TelePresence Conductor is available either as an on-premises appliance
or as a virtualized application, based on market-leading VMware virtual environments. Please use the
following part numbers.
Cisco TelePresence Conductor Appliance
Cisco TelePresence Conductor (Virtualized Application)
CTI-CNDTR-K9
R-VMCNDTR-K9
2. What is the customer value proposition for the Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized
application?
For enterprises that are using video communications to increase productivity and that want to further
improve teamwork by accelerating their employees’ uptake of multiparty conferencing, Cisco TelePresence Conductor is a TelePresence application server that simplifies multiparty conferencing for the end user.
This solution liberates users by enabling simple and natural conferencing.
As a virtual application, Cisco TelePresence Conductor can be installed in any virtual environment,
providing immediate cost benefits across the board, including IT administrative and system management
costs and additional IT infrastructure investment, allowing organizations to do more with less and sharpen
their competitiveness in tough economic times.
3. What are the cross-sell opportunities?
Cross-sell opportunities exist to those customers who already own one or more Cisco® VCS Controls and
one or more Cisco TelePresence MCUs (or Cisco TelePresence Server in the next release).
4. Who are the target customers for Cisco TelePresence Conductor?
Target customers for Cisco TelePresence Conductor are existing Cisco TelePresence MCU and future
Cisco TelePresence Server customers. The sweet spot in this market segment will be those customers
who already own one or more Cisco VCS Controls and one or more Cisco TelePresence MCUs and, in
future, TelePresence Server. Note that support for TelePresence Server working in conjunction with
Conductor will be available with the next major software release of both TelePresence Server and
TelePresence Conductor.
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Along with the target customers listed above, Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized will have
the following target customers:

TelePresence Conductor appliance customers with upcoming migrations who are ready to
move from the TelePresence Conductor appliance to a virtualized environment

VMware-ready customers ready to run a virtualized application on VMware
Technical Specifications
1. Which multipoint products does TelePresence Conductor support?
Cisco TelePresence Conductor will work with the following Cisco TelePresence MCUs, as well as with
TelePresence Server following the next release:
•
Cisco TelePresence MCU 4200 Series
•
Cisco TelePresence MCU 4500 Series
•
Cisco TelePresence MCU 4501
•
Cisco TelePresence MCU 5300 Series
•
Cisco TelePresence MSE 8510 Media 2 blades
•
Cisco TelePresence MSE 8420 Media blades
•
Cisco TelePresence Server 7010 (next release)
•
Cisco TelePresence Server MSE 8710 (next release)
2. Will TelePresence Conductor support third-party MCUs?
Support for third-party MCUs is not currently planned but may be considered in the future if demand is
sufficient.
3. Can conferences be personalized?
Using Cisco TelePresence Conductor, an individual’s rendezvous conference (a personal conference with
the person’s unique conference ID) can be configured to support personal preferences for features such as
layout, PIN, encryption preference, and others.
4. Will Cisco TelePresence Conductor support conference recording?
Cisco TelePresence Conductor will support dialing out to invitees so that a recording device may
automatically be included in any conference.
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5. Which telepresence/video endpoints does TelePresence Conductor work with?
Cisco TelePresence Conductor works with any standards-based endpoint that is supported by VCS/Cisco
Unified Communications Manager.
6. What capabilities will TelePresence Conductor have when working with TMS?
Conference management using the TMS Conference Control Center is supported, and in the future TMS
scheduling against TelePresence Conductor will also be supported. Many customers prefer to schedule a
meeting (in Outlook or other meeting tool) and simply add the dial-in details for their rendezvous
conference. This saves them from having to schedule a specific conference for a meeting. TelePresence
Conductor will dynamically select the most appropriate resource for the conference when it is initiated.
Customers will benefit from improved resilience, personalization, and other features.
7. Are both B and C Series Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) platforms supported
for the Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized application?
Yes, both B and C Series platforms are supported. This includes:
a) Cisco UCS B200 M1 Blade Server
b) Cisco UCS B200 M2 Blade Server
c) Cisco UCS C210 M1 General-Purpose Rack-Mount Server
d) Cisco UCS C210 M2 General-Purpose Rack-Mount Server
e) Cisco UCS C220 M3 General-Purpose Rack Mount Server
8. Can the Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized application run co-resident with other unified
communications applications?
Yes, Cisco TelePresence Conductor can co-reside with Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Cisco
VCS, enriching unified communications services with telepresence capabilities.
9. What are the design constraints when running co-resident applications including Cisco
TelePresence Conductor?
The Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized application may run co-resident with other applications
provided the design and deployment adhere to Cisco policy on co-resident virtual machines.
10. How do I obtain the Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized application?
The Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized
www.cisco.com/cisco/web/support/index.html.
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application
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11. Will the Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized application run on any VMware ESXi certified
host?
Yes. Given the appropriate resources, the Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized application can run
on third-party hardware. Please refer to the data sheet for details.
12. What versions of ESXi are supported on the Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized
application?
ESXi 4.1 or later versions will be supported at launch.
13. What is the "spec-based" mode for Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized application?
Specification-based mode for the Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized application simply means the
application can run on any supported platform given the appropriate resources. Please refer to the data
sheet for details of supported third-party platforms to run virtualized Cisco TelePresence Conductor.
14. Does the Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized application work with VMware features such
as vMotion?
VMware offers a number of infrastructure features such as vMotion that have been shown to work with
Cisco TelePresence Conductor and offer a great deal of flexibility in the deployment and administration of
Conductor.
15. Can I run the Cisco TelePresence Conductor virtualized application on both C and B Series UCS
platforms?
Yes. All C and B Series models are supported as tested reference configurations.
16. Who do I contact for more information on Cisco TelePresence Conductor?
Please contact your Cisco account manager for more information, or log in to:
www.cisco.com/go/telepresenceconductor
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