Can we live without Telepresence?

[mcblokland]

I have mixed feelings on Telepresence sales, all newspapers and magazines are writing about it. In real life however, the sales seems less impressive as reported in the media. Just wondering, is it a hype or will it stay. Curious what you think.

[Unified]

Hi,

I tend to agree with you the vendors are always talking up the number of opportunities they have, but I dont see many real and validated installations. For mine this is a CEO toy phase which could well be served by HD Video endpoints.Lets see if we can get some market data on sales, although they are all coming off a low base line, which will indicate good growth.

Chat soon

[nonaligned]

I agree is mostly hype and hype that was initiated by the mammoth marketing department of Cisco. It wasn't until Cisco had the brilliant idea to market a technology that had already been around for a long time and market it as something new. Telepresence is just a high quality, expensive version of video conferencing.

I think Cisco's entry in the video conferencing market has been good for the more traditional players such as Tandberg and Polycom but I'm not sure Cisco's, Polycom's, and Tandberg's Telepresence push has been so good for the end users. From the end user perspective, they are just receiving partial advice on a niche technology from another vendor trying to sell something new and not getting a consultative approach to what their actual conferencing and collaborative requirements really are.

[jakefan2006]

The advanced HD codec from traditional SD provoders like Polycom and Tandberg changed Telepresence from a unique product of CISCO to a popular application everyone can play with. If the differences between Telepresence and HD videoconferencing are just display design, camera adjustment, lights and furnitures, it hard to foresee its future.

[Glenn]

Hi Jake,

Yes the TP hype is exactly that, it's pretty much HD video with bigger screens as you say. Despite all the hype by the TP vendors about the opportunities they have the reality is that the actual install base is quite small. With the economy on the blink at the moment I cant imagine its easy for a CEO to justify what is essentially a nice to have over more than acceptable HD units. Having said that, never underestimate the marketing power of the likes of Cisco and their influence over major accounts.

[wilcoxen]

Telepresence used to actually mean something. In some circles, it still does, but it has been largely hijacked by the industry marketing machine, and no, I'm not talking about Cisco. Cisco was clever enough to take an industry term, which used to define the mix of art and science that created the illusion that a group of people around the world were sitting around a global table, and use it as their product name. Make no mistake though, "t"elepresence (not TelePresence) has a time and a place, just as does a Bentley or S-Class Mercedes. "t"elepresence with a little "t", describes a user experience where a group of people can sit down and experience a high fidelity, deeply interactive, collaborative session where eye contact, life like representations of each other, and an audio/video technology make you forget the other person is actually not in the room with you.

Can we live without telepresence? Yes, we've done it for a very long time? Can we live without a lot of advances that technology has provided? Surely. If we have the means to create an environment where people can collaborate like never before, should we live without it? Perhaps. I'm not sure. Today it's all about the price point of hardware, software, networks, and services. As those come down, the discussion will shift from can we live without it, to "how broadly do I deploy it?"

Is a 20" HD screen on your desk with an embedded camera and microphone a telepresence experience? I'd say no, but the marketing machine that is active today has basically renamed video conferencing as telepresence as long as it supports HD. HD is a necessary, but not sufficient component of telepresence. It's really about the human factors that are taken into account when creating a telepresence environment. Could you create your own? Absolutely! It's what A/V integrators have been doing for years before someone got wise and said, "what if we could bundle the entire room into a single SKU?"

Anyway, I hope this sparks some interest. I've designed multiple telepresence solutions from 4 of 5 major manufacturers. Given the right positioning, ROI and productivity analysis it is an easy conversation to have with the board of any company in a geographically disperse situation. Could HD video substitute for telepresence? In many cases yes, in some cases, no.

Just my $0.02.

[Bjorn]

I understand and agree with some of the views below, particularly in that the maturity, the acceptance and scope of this market, today, is low and small respectively but not insignificant. And it’s not going to shrink. I work for TANDBERG so one could argue that I’m compelled to say the following! I’m not though. In my years in IT I’ve enjoyed a somewhat informal career path as a systems integrator and it can give you a different perspective on how technology can be applied sensibly to deliver the business outcomes the customer desires or expects from his IT - particularly his investment in connectivity (in all senses of the word; process, people, productivity etc etc). Telepresence might be perceived as niche market (in terms of how some vendors might sell the device at CxO level) but not only is there is a market in that ‘niche’ but categorically you can extend the benefits in a relevant way to any layer of the business, any layer of IT. So, personally, I’m looking forward to more deployments (I guess we all are!)