[3] Company founders Daniel Harple and Richard Pizzarro met in 1990 while employed as computer engineers at AMP Incorporated in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
The pair wanted to create a way to let engineers working together on a design speak to and look at one another without leaving their desks over a real time video network requiring only "regular computers and cheap, desktop cameras".
Harple and Pizarro worked on their idea after hours, creating improvised labs in spare bedrooms, and connecting borrowed workstations with streams of cable.
The two men left AMP to co-found InSoft Inc. in 1992, with Harple acting as Chairman and CEO and Pizzarro as Chief Engineer and Vice President.
[5][6] In 1992, SunWorld magazine praised InSoft's Communique product as a "killer app" for Sun, calling it "the next logical step in improving computers as communications devices".
"[4][7] A 1994 issue of VARBusiness magazine described InSoft as pursuing "a new software model" completely independent of the compression hardware and network type that analysts predicted would dominate the future of videoconferencing.
[5] One analyst attributed InSoft's success to "its capability to deliver a product for workstations that didn't represent a huge incremental expense, and go after the PC market later."
InSoft went on to sign Communique bundling deals with major technology companies such as AT&T, Sprint, Hewlett Packard, Digital Equipment, and IBM.
Although the final products were sold primarily through stores, the company let potential customers download test versions for review and comment.
[2] Communique was able to operate across Ethernet and between a variety of data communications services such as ATM, frame-relay, ISDN and SMDS, as well as any standard network that ran TCP/IP.
[5] This was because it used InSoft's Digital Video Everywhere (Open DVE), a proprietary algorithm that featured an API for running multimedia conferencing software across many kinds of networks, not independent of the hardware they used.
Running as an independent software layer on top of the specific host operating system, DVE architecture let users and vendors customize their InSoft-equipped networks by building applications that worked through Communique.
The product included a suite of APIs, libraries and management tools designed to allow companies to add conferencing ability to their own software.
[14] ICEMaker was a software development kit that let users and customers build distributed multimedia applications to run over the Internet or corporate Intranet.