Returns on TelePresence are proportionately impressive

Returns on TelePresence are proportionately impressive

Due to its ability to create a real sense of an in-person, face-to-face meeting, organizations can reap considerable benefits from reduced travel expenses, greater productivity, and better relationships among employees, customers and partners

Idhries Ahmad

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

To term Tele-presence an improved upon version of video conferencing will be great disservice to this latest technological marvel. IMR research categorises Telepresence in the top 10 disruptive technologies for the next decade.

What is Telepresence, how will it impact communications, Ranajoy Punja, Vice President- Business Development, Advanced Technologies, Cisco India & SAARC explains in detail to Idhries Ahmad of CIOL.

CIOL: How does Telepresence work? I understand the basic framework is IPTV. But it will be great if you could explain in detail how two end points communicate. What is the sort of equipment involved?

Rananjoy Punja: TelePresence delivers a unique, "in-person" experience over the converged network. Using advanced visual, audio, and collaboration technologies, these new "telepresence" applications deliver real-time, face-to-face interactions between people and places in their work and personal lives. In some cases, these products use a room-within-a-room environment along with life-size images, and high-definition resolution with spatial and discrete audio to create a live, face-to-face meeting around a single "virtual" table.

The components of these systems utilize standard technologies in conjunction with specialized applications and hardware to create a unique, yet approachable solution using the network and unified communications as core components to deliver this new experience.

Audio/Visual Technology
TelePresence systems incorporate the most up-to-date standards and technologies to offer the best audio and visual results:

Network
These systems use the standard IP technology deployed in corporations today, and should run on an integrated voice/video/data network. Such systems support high-quality, real-time voice and video communications with branch offices using broadband connections.

Hardware-Optimized Environment
These systems often include purpose-built office furniture, which incorporate cameras and displays, lighting, speakers, microphones, and projection capability into a specially designed table for larger rooms, or, in smaller configurations, with existing office furniture.

Software Applications
TelePresence applications incorporate a variety of new and existing standards-based software for accommodating converged voice and video transmissions, including:

IP telephony: They work with IP-based phones and call-processing systems from the major networking and telecommunications vendors.

Groupware: Integration with enterprise groupware solutions (such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes) accommodates easy scheduling of meetings and access to corporate information.

CIOL: How much will an enterprise have to shell if it deploys telepresence. Media reports suggest a price point of $300,000 per studio. Is it so? If yes, won’t the cost prove an impediment for large-scale deployment?

RP: The Cisco TelePresence 3000 costs approximately $300,000 for each installation,, while the TelePresence 1000 runs about $80,000 per room. While the initial expense is relatively high compared to standard video conferencing products and services, the return on TelePresence is proportionately impressive.

Due to its ability to create a real sense of an in-person, face-to-face meeting, organizations can reap considerable benefits from reduced travel expenses, greater productivity, and better relationships among employees, customers and partners.

Travel cost savings and time-savings are a huge productivity disruption, especially for global companies. More often than not, people taking the most and the longest trips are usually the organization’s key executives and employees, rendering them unavailable simply because of travel down-time.

Lastly, we believe that component pricing for most of the key telepresence technologies, such as the plasma screens and even the broadband connections, will almost certainly continue to drop rapidly, making it possible in just a few years to use telepresence in a far wider array of applications and making it affordable for many more organizations.

CIOL: Also should we expect the costs of the studios (equipment) to come down in near future?

RP: As in the case of any new technology, the cost is directly related to the rate of adoption of the technology. This would be the case with the Telepresence solution as well. However, we believe that the benefits – financial and productivity – will far out weigh the set up and operational costs of the solution and our customers are already seeing these benefits, resulting in high adoption rates for this solution in the market.

CIOL: Also how many units has Cisco been able to sell and how many customers are there already in kitty. Names of the customers will be really appreciated. Any customer from India?

RP: We are witnessing very good traction amongst Indian businesses, to TP as a solution. Further, as pointed out by our CEO, John Chambers, Telepresence is one of our fastest growing businesses amongst our Emerging Technologies. We have already sold and deployed several TP solutions in India, however are not in a position to disclose the names of these customers yet.

CIOL: Cisco has been able to save on travel costs using this technology. Can you please quantify how much you have been able to save and could you also give me data on other enterprises that were able to save on their travel cost?

RP: As of the end of November 20, 2007, 37,069 meetings were held out of which 8,061 meetings included participants who avoided travel by attending meetings over TelePresence, which is $62 Million in travel avoidance savings. At the moment, Cisco has 157 Cisco Telepresence rooms set up across our offices worldwide.

CIOL: Telepresence itself is a huge application that requires huge dedicated bandwidth. In a country like India, where bandwidth comes at a premium how do you see this acting as a deterrent to the technology

RP: Telepresence is a bandwidth intensive solution and hence at this point, is being adopted primarily by our enterprise customers who have this bandwidth already in place.

Other customers include companies such as Regus who have plans of offering Telepresence as a managed service to businesses on a pay per use basis. This is a model which can be very effective in India as well. Further, as pointed out above, with greater technology adoption, prices have a tendency to fall and this trend is also expected with broadband adoption in the country.

CIOL: What are the verticals that Cisco sees Tele presence getting traction in the market?

RP: Major verticals who have adopted this technology are ITS and Software companies, Manufacturing and Banking & Financial institutions. The driving factor is better collaboration which is needed by all companies having geographically dispersed work force and customers. Financial companies are using it to expedite decision making process in a highly competitive environment in the industry.

Service providers and large enterprise customers have been very positive about the solution, across vertical segments. We are finding that customers who actually use the facility are overwhelmingly positive about the solution and the potential to enhance their business and productivity.

An interesting vertical where this technology is gaining ground is government. There is need to improve the decision making process in Government too and with the help of technology the state headquarters are a click away from district headquarters. Now days Chief Ministers are reviewing their pet projects with district administration directly using this simple yet effective technology. This brings in better transparency and accountability from the administration.

CIOL: How does Cisco see competition from the likes of Telanetix, Polycom, Hewlett-Packard Teliris and Codian?Agree Cisco is ahead on technology front, but where these vendors gain is their products score on cost. How does Cisco see the challenge? Or does it see challenge at all

RP:Those mentioned above are traditional video conferencing vendors and in the 15 plus years of the market existence, the technology has failed. Traditional videoconferencing solutions are difficult to use, counter-intuitive, unreliable and usually require the help of support staff to operate. It was never able to provide live “face to face” technology.

Increased collaboration has become the key to successful businesses in today’s globalized world. With 60 per cent of communication being non-verbal, and 30 per cent of the brain’s cortex being devoted to vision, 8 per cent on touch, and 3 per cent on hearing – rich media that allows the use of all these senses would assume great significance. Cisco TelePresence offers an ultra high-definition, spatial audio, real-time, in-person experience. It creates a live, face-to-face meeting experience over the network, empowering users to interact and collaborate like never before.

We see a lot of excitement in the market around TelePresence. And though there are similarities between Cisco TelePresence and other high-end videoconferencing systems available today, there are also significant differences on which we compete.

Also existing solutions require massive “behind the curtain” support (one competitor requires $20,000 per month to manage and a team of people to support their product). The Cisco TelePresence service requirement takes our traditional lifecycle services approach to ensure that our customers have the best possible experience from the start at nothing like the fees charged by our competitors.

©CIOL Bureau