Telepresence A disruptive technology

Telepresence: A disruptive technology

The Human Productivity Lab defines telepresence as “the science and art of creating visual conferencing environments that address the human factors of participants and duplicate, as closely as possible, an in-person experience. Telepresence greatly improves end-user acceptance, which dramatically increases usage and substantially improves demand, return on investment and customer satisfaction.”

Friday, January 25, 2008

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Idhries Ahmad

BANGALORE, INDIA: The essence of telepresence is enabling effective communications and enabling presence without having to travel.Telepresence greatly improves end-user acceptance, which dramatically increases usage and substantially improves demand, return on investment and customer satisfaction."

What is Telepresence

The Human Productivity Lab defines telepresence as "the science and art of creating visual conferencing environments that address the human factors of participants and duplicate, as closely as possible, an in-person experience. Telepresence greatly improves end-user acceptance, which dramatically increases usage and substantially improves demand, return on investment and customer satisfaction."

HD telepresence combines superb sound and video quality with ergonomically designed rooms, furniture and other environmental factors to create an immersive experience that makes meeting participants in multiple geographic locations feel as if they are all in the same conference room. Telepresence can help companies increase business agility and communications effectiveness, reduce travel and operating costs, and reduce carbon emissions. IDC projects a $1.2 billion global market for telepresence by 2011.

The essence of telepresence is enabling effective communications and enabling presence without having to travel. Nortel has offered video conferencing solutions since IP-based switching became the mainstream in the early 1990s. As lower-cost IP networks have made higher bandwidth more readily available, demand for HD videoconferencing and telepresence has risen to a six-figure market. Nortel formally entered the market for HD video conferencing and telepresence with the announcement of its Multimedia Services portfolio and resale relationship with Polycom in May 2007.

Nortel offers complete, turnkey managed HD video conferencing and telepresence services based on Polycom's Real Presence Experience (RPX) and other Polycom video conferencing systems. These services are part of Nortel's Multimedia Services portfolio, which also includes integrated audio conferencing, webcasting and web collaboration services. All of these services can be provided to customers globally with 24/7 support and reliability.

Under the agreement, Nortel and Polycom will go to the market with video conferencing services driving a new level of efficiency and productivity in its enterprise customers, thereby bringing immersive telepresence experience to market. The Nortel Polycom immersive experience uniquely makes geographically dispersed meeting participants feel as though they are sitting around the same conference table. With two locations using the Nortel Polycom solution, the high definition audio and video capabilities, the similar furnishings, the collaboration facilities all truly give the appearance of being in the same room with someone in Seattle, even if you're in Talahassee, Florida or Frankfurt, Germany.

Cisco and the rest of the competition is 12 to 18 months away from even catching up to where Nortel currently is with telepresence. Cisco's Telepresence is not nearly as immersive as ours is. They put a couple of plasma screens in front of you, but it's not the same immersive experience as this.

Video conferencing technology has traditionally been perceived as less than easy to use and not of sufficiently high voice or video quality to approach the effectiveness of face-to-face communications. Systems haven't been intuitive to use. Users often had to find an instruction manual, find and figure out how to use a remote control, manually pan a camera to the person speaking, constantly move desktop microphones from one location to another to ensure that all speakers were heard, focus their attention on a camera and monitor in front of the room rather than the person speaking at any given time, and so on.

In effect, the videoconferencing experience has not been real enough to provide the same convenience and effectiveness of actual presence. But now, HD video and audio quality can make users at multiple locations feel like they are in the same room. Decreasing network bandwidth costs are making the return on investment in telepresence more and more attractive versus travel, which is also growing less attractive due to security and environmental concerns. And managed HD video conferencing and telepresence services remove much of the operating and maintenance complexity. Documented case studies have shown that use of managed HD videoconferencing and telepresence can improve P&L by as much as 20 percent. The ability to meet and communicate via telepresence versus travel can help businesses be more agile, make decisions more rapidly, and generate revenue more quickly.

Geographically dispersed organizations can be more connected and can collaborate more effectively, improving business performance as well as employee satisfaction. Travel can be reduced, resulting in cost savings as well as reduced environmental impact. Even customer, supplier and partner collaboration can be improved by extending telepresence use beyond just employees. Though the benefits of HD video conferencing and telepresence are clear, the investment can be significant, resulting in a long sales cycle. Innovative uses of telepresence include medical consultations, hotel and convention center business conferencing services, and remote repair and maintenance assistance for offshore oil rigs.

Nortel and Polycom have, in May 2007, added high definition (HD) video conferencing and telepresence to unified communications for enterprises, greatly expanding the possibilities for growth, enhanced productivity, lower cost and reduced carbon footprint by incorporating real-time video collaboration from the desktop to the board room. With this joint unified communications solution, users can get one-click desktop access to HD video conferencing, along with telephony, instant messaging and e-mail. This gives them the ability, for example, to have immediate, face-to-face meetings with anyone, anywhere in the world.

To have such an immersive experience requires a lot of expensive equipment and a lot of personnel managing the service. But, at an average list price of $300,000, which includes screens, servers, lighting and microphones (but not the network traffic and installation), these telepresence rooms do not come cheap. Standard video-conferencing systems sell at anywhere between $5,000 to $80,000 per system. The majority of the interest in Nortel's telepresence has come from large financial institutions, and the installations for the most part are aimed at only "C-level executives."

A Frost & Sullivan analysis estimates that the Asia Pacific Telepresence market in 2006 totaled $9.5 million and is expected to be worth $250.8 million by end-2013, growing at a CAGR of 59.6 per cent.

Emerging markets with little installed telecom infrastructure are finding it easier to install wireless networks, and India's no exception: 3.51 million of the subscribers added in November were mobile customers, and most of the 280,000 fixed-line subscribers were connected using wireless local loop. India now has 48.47 million fixed subscribers and 71.46 million mobile users for a total of 120 million.

Broadband is the hot topic in India at the moment. This year has been designated by the Indian government as the "Year of Broadband" as the main carriers work to boost the number of broadband connections to 20 million by 2010.

As Telepresence matures, bandwidth prices decline, lower-cost options are developed for medium-sized businesses, and sales enablement tools are created for the channel, there will be a broader audience at a more attractive price point for solution providers to enter and for their end customers to digest. This may happen over time and is not something that partners are waiting for as they have other areas that are more immediate such as VoIP.

Nortel is currently working with a large multinational BFSI consulting client across locations in India, amongst a whole lot of other prospective clients both in India and abroad. Nortel would predict the market growth in the Telepresence vertical to read as follows
©CIOL Bureau

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