User:Pchenomn/Omnovia
omNovia is the short name for the company omNovia Technologies Inc incorporated in Houston, TX, USA early 2004. omNovia offers information security and communication software systems. omNovia is more known for its Secure Conference platform, which is a web conferencing system.
Name Origin
omNovia comes from the words "omni" (from latin omnis: all) and "Innovation". The capital letter N in the name with lower case letter o, symbolizes innovation in the very name of the organization.
History
omNovia Technologies Inc was started by Shahin (Shawn) Shadfar. Headquartered in Houston, TX omNovia has offices in Paris, France and Brisbane, Australia and has a worldwide customer-base.
omNovia started originally as an Information Security consulting firm specializing in Smart Card based security projects. Almost by coincidence the company created its first software product, Secure Viewer for a customer to distribute online courses. The success of the first product lead to more focus in software products in the web conferencing space. By mid 2005, the company had released the first version of its Secure Conference.
Products
The company has produced 3 software products. However only the Secure Conference product is well-known. The omNovia Secure Conference is a 100% web-based system (Adobe Flash interface) that requires no software installs or upgrades and offers voice, video, image (desktop sharing) and other interactive tools that allow online presentations and webinars. The omNovia Secure Conference has the particularity to allow thousands of simultaneous viewers via a technology that spans a virtual room over different servers.
The third version of Secure Conference was released in mid-2007 and brings improvements and bug fixes to the second version. It also offers a new customizable interface.
Technology
Around 2005 a few companies started offering all-inclusive web-based conferencing systems. Previously some components of the web conferencing systems were not available through the web. As an example, you had to dial a phone number to connect to other participants via voice. Compressions technologies along with higher bandwidth available on the Internet allowed the addition of voice into web conferencing systems.
Around the same timeframe companies started to offer sophisticated virtual conference rooms through web-browsers such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox instead of requiring a full software install. Installing software can be cumbersome, compromize security or inpractical specially in large organizations where one cannot install any software without administrative rights on PCs.
The challenging part in web conferencing systems is to maintain high reliablity with large rooms. User management and maintaining a good quality voice and fast image for hundreds of participants spanning over hours continuously can cause serious technical and infrastructure problems. omNovia also struggled with these challenges. The Version 2 of the Secure Conference had a few software bugs that caused rare interruptions of service. The new Version 3 seems to have overcome those issues and offers a stable platform.
Webex can be considered as the pioneer company in the web conferencing systems.
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