The rapid growth and technological change in the IT world is infiltrating the videoconferencing industry as well. A few years ago videoconferencing equipment were large and had loud cooling systems while the currently available versions are more compact and yet more developed devices. Videoconferencing server components do not have to be considered a robust and expensive target hardware as almost all manufacturers offer equivalent solutions in a virtual environment or its own cloud-based service.
Most of the currently prevalent videoconferencing devices communicate via IP network using the industry standard H.323 or SIP protocols. Most devices can handle both protocols so in the vast majority of the cases a call set-up will not cause a problem. However, in some cases gateways are required because of the different communication channel or encoding, or the company firewall transition is problematic.
