SwitchTower Multimedia Network

Raindance's SwitchTower® multimedia network is the foundation of our collaborative web, audio and desktop video conferencing services. SwitchTower is a distributed network design allowing Raindance to deliver interactive online meetings and events throughout our network, the Internet and into the enterprise. SwitchTower is also fully integrated with Raindance's carrier-class audio conferencing platform, which can support several million minutes a day.

SwitchTower consists of three major elements — media switches, feature services and user endpoints:

• Media switches - At the center of the SwitchTower network is a system of intelligent media switches. These elements act like routers, facilitating virtual peer-to-peer connectivity between the user endpoints and feature services to optimize the conferencing experience for high-performance, multimedia delivery.
• Feature services - Feature services are the building blocks of the meeting experience. For example, Raindance's patent-pending application sharing service is unique in that it renders updates at a pace appropriate to the user's connection speed.
• User endpoints - Each computer running Raindance Meeting Edition and Raindance Seminar Edition represents an endpoint on the SwitchTower network. These endpoints provide the actual meeting experience and are free to message between each other directly or through feature services depending on the media involved and conference function. This flexibility allows for rich media applications previously not possible using client server or thin client architectures.

Key advantages of SwitchTower include:

• High-performance - SwitchTower is adaptable enough to balance and shift resources during peak loads in order to support bandwidth-intensive services such as multipoint video.
• Scalability - As our customer's remote meeting usage grows, the SwitchTower network can easily scale to meet demand without service interruptions both in ASP and on-premise environments.
• Redundancy - The network is also equipped with real-time failover capability so meetings and events are not affected by hardware or software failures.
• Security - Several flexible security configurations are possible by allowing enterprise customers to host portions of the service on their own network.