FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

San Jose, Calif., May 25, 2004 - IMTC, the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium has decided to honor the lifetime achievements of two eminent multimedia pioneers and their contribution to this industry: IMTC Lifetime Achievement Awards went to Dr. Ronald Arps, IBM Research Emeritus, and George Helder, former Vice-Chairman of the ITU-T SG16. Both have been instrumental over decades in enabling the evolving multimedia communications industry; Dr. Arps as a leading research figure in the area of document image compression and coding for 40 years at IBM and key contributor to joint ISO/IEC and ITU standards including JBIG and JPEG; Mr. Helder as delegate of AT&T Bell Labs and later Picture Tel to various standardization groups within the International Telecommunication Union for 34 years. The awards were announced during the three-day 2004 IMTC Forum, which took place last week at the venue of Sony Electronics in San Jose, California.

Engineers, decision maskers, and researchers from the Multimedia industry participated in this conference, which marked a decisive point in the history of multimedia communications. After achieving growth rates well above general market expansion over the past few years, experts are now seeing an explosive development in the area of Web and Data conferencing. According to data presented by Lester F. Ludwig, Vice President and Principal Scientist at Avistar Communications Corporation, this type of communication will go up a stunning 40 to 80 percent over the next years, while "classical" Videoconferencing as used by many companies is expected to go up a still impressive 12 to 19 percent.

Faced with such growth rates there was a general consensus among the Forum participants that the Multimedia Industry is now set for a major leap forward, joining the efforts for creating the Next Generation Networks. As many of the papers and discussions at the conference showed, the multimedia industry positioned for this next step. New standards such as H.350, presented by Jill Gemmill, Assistant Director of Academic Computing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, make access and use of multimedia tools easier, SIP and H.323 show significant advantages in building up conferences on new networks, as was for example demonstrated by Mike Chapman, Director of Product Marketing at Ubiquity Software. Especially the full-day session on "Making Multimedia Mobile" gave a strong indication of the ongoing convergence of networks and technologies. As was suggested by Forum participants at several occasions, multimedia telecommunications seem to be particularly well prepared for the NGNs, since many of he features now being discussed for the coming networks have originally been developed for mobile networks. Given this experience, the multimedia telecommunications community appears to be in the driving seat for many things to come.

The 2004 IMTC Forum, which was hosted at Sony Electronics, has been endorsed by Frost and Sullivan Consulting, the Interactive Multimedia and Collaborative Communications Alliance (IMCCA), the OSGi Alliance, and Wainhouse Research.

About the IMTC
The International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) is an industry-leading non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, encourage, and facilitate the development and implementation of interoperable multimedia conferencing solutions based on open international standards. The IMTC hosts interoperability testing events and demonstrations throughout the world. Over the past three years the IMTC has hosted more than 20 interoperability-testing events to test H.323, H.324, SIP, T.120, H .320, and Voice over IP products and services with each other. The IMTC Board of Directors includes representatives from Cisco Systems, Dilithium Networks, Emblaze Systems, France Telecom, Nextreaming Corp., Nokia, Nortel Networks, Polycom, RADVISION, Siemens AG, Sony, and TANDBERG. The San Ramon, California-based consortium comprises approximately 70 member organizations from around the globe. Membership is open to any interested party, including vendors of audio, document, and video conferencing hardware and software; academic institutions; government agencies; and non-profit organizations. "The IMTC is making Rich Media happen Anywhere, Anytime." Further information on IMTC can be found at http://www.imtc.org.