"The distributed nature of cloud computing brings automated load balancing, failover and scalability to a product category - video conferencing infrastructure - that has historically required high investment for a single point of failure and only a few ports for expansion. In other words, cloud computing is more cost effective and easier to expand, and you get some resiliency to boot," said Allen Drennan, Nefsis Chief Technology Officer. "Our new, advanced proximity heuristics sets us apart from hosted services and less distributed cloud solutions."

Nefsis, an online video conferencing provider, announced on Monday advances to its distributed cloud computing technology: intelligently virtualizing online meeting rooms closer to business participants. This advancement leverages the distributed nature of cloud computing and real-time routing information to reduce roundtrip latency time for video conferencing and live data sharing over the Internet. Customers enjoy faster response times and better quality video, especially in working sessions where multipoint video, HD and live collaboration with desktops are involved.

The video conferencing industry is responding to rising demand among desktop users across multiple departments, regional offices and external customers. Organizations require more "multipoint" connections - i.e., more than two endpoints in one conference - and the ability to address the fact that virtually 100 percent of business desktops are behind firewalls and proxies.

Infrastructure hardware solutions, such as video routers, MCUs and gateways, solve multipoint and proxy traversal challenges with on-premise equipment and high up-front costs. The latest cloud-based solutions take a new approach using distributed, dynamically responding resources to provide the same functional capabilities. These shared resource pools make video conferencing less expensive and easier to expand.

Nefsis takes cloud computing a step further by applying its proximity heuristics to dynamically allocate resources in real-time as close as possible to online meeting participants. The heuristics include physical geo-location, ping time to several potential virtual conference servers, resource load and availability, and more. By considering these factors and several others, Nefsis intelligently virtualizes each conference at the best location. This is markedly different from static data centers and hosted services, which do not respond in any meaningful way as employees move around and start conferences from different locations.

Advances were made to the Nefsis global cloud through several recent phased-in updates and are available now to all Nefsis customers and free trial users.