Citrix Online Chooses GIPS Technologies

There are few things that have improved my personal quality of life as much as Citrix® GotoMeeting® service. Before I signed up for GotoMeeting®, way back in 2004, I was spending a lot more time on airplanes visiting customer sites to troubleshoot problems.  These days most problems we can troubleshoot remotely. It’s both faster and less costly.

As GotoMeeting® has evolved they tied in an audio conferencing service, presumably a partner that provided the service through their own facilities. I tried using this a couple of times but the call quality was not great. It seemed typical of some of the lesser free conference services. So for the longest time we used a separate conference bridge, even though GotoMeeting® offered an attached service.

As I recall the only means of connecting to their conference bridge was via the PSTN. That’s ok, but we have substantial VoIP infrastructure so dial-in by SIP URI would have been great.

Monday this week Global IP Solutions® issued a press release announcing that Citrix® has selected their VoiceEngine and Voice ConferenceEngine for their GotoMeeting® and GotoWebinar® services.

Upon receiving this press release I logged into my GotoMeeting® account as was surprised to find that the prior conference offering had been completely written out in a recent software release. Since I was not in the habit of using it I simply hadn’t missed it at all. In it’s place was an area in which to display the conference connect details for the service of your choice. That’s handy. But evidently that’s just a placeholder for bigger things to come.

Licensing GIPS software offerings certainly gives Citrix® the ability to add some very good audio capabilities into their client software. A large part of the early success of Skype can be traced to GIPS technologies. As a resource to add VoIP capability to the Citrix® clients GIPS seems like a solid choice.

It’s unclear to me if the majority of users will be comfortable with a headset & mic plugged into their PC. I suspect that many would rather make the call using a normal phone, possibly even a SIP phone. Hopefully Citrix®’s implementation will accommodate all of these potentials.