Can I Offload Video/Voice to Dedicated Hardware in OCS 2007?

Great question asked by an attendee at an earlier event. Here is the answer for everyone.

The only way having dedicated hardware could help lower network cost would be if it could be used to encode/decode audio/video more efficiently such that it uses less bandwidth. However, this is not likely to make much sense as the added TCO for the extra hardware will likely be more than is saved in bandwidth costs. Most conferencing systems that use dedicated hardware do so to increase the number of users they can support; not to save bandwidth. In OCS 2007 we use computationally efficient codecs, and a few other tricks, so that we can provide comparable scale running on much cheaper off the shelf server hardware.