Srinivasan Tukaram: The Human Productivity Lab (www.humanproductivitylab.com) 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.

CIOL: Where do you see all the vendors in terms of cost benefit analysis for the end user and who will gain in the longer run. Do you agree Cisco is ahead on technology front, but where these vendors gain is their products score on cost.  

Srinivasan Tukaram: 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.

CIOL: Vendors harp that Telepresence coupled with unified communications an will help them deliver bigger productivity for customers. Can you explain how Nortel envisions this complicated process of marrying these entities?

ST: 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.

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

ST: 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."

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 

ST: 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.

CIOL: Also how many units has your company 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?    

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: Tele presence has been hyped as wonderful means to save on travel costs. 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?  

ST: Nortel and Polycom are making it possible for employees, customers and suppliers thousands of miles apart to experience face-to-face meetings so real they'll almost believe they're in the same room. This provides all the benefits without the time, expense and environmental impact of travel. By year-end 2007, nearly 30 locations, had deployed the Nortel and Polycom RealPresence(1) Experience (RPX(1))(2) suites across Frankfurt, New York, Toronto, Dallas and Raleigh, N.C. Planned additional locations include London, Beijing, New Delhi, Singapore and Chicago.

Nortel Telepresence provides an increased return on 'hard' and 'soft' dollars by creating savings on travel budgets, as well as improving the work/life balance of business travelers. The organization will regain productivity, time spent in transit, and be able utilize it for greater business opportunities.

The value of replacing in person meetings with virtual ones cannot be overstated. The so called "executive wear and tear" induced by business travel is extending to more people within organizations, as knowledge workers find themselves having to travel to collaborate with their colleagues. Furthermore, companies are increasingly under pressure to offset the negative impact they have on the environment. Replacing air and auto travel with network-based visual communications can go a long way toward saving on carbon emissions—a move that has PR and shareholder value, as well as benefits to the corporate bottom line.

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

ST: With HD video conferencing and telepresence, doctors can provide more life-saving, long-distance consultations. Banks and other financial institutions can make faster, more well-informed decisions impacting transactions worth millions of dollars.

Hotels can increase revenues by expanding business services to include highly-efficient, multi-location conferencing and collaboration. Offshore oil drilling rigs can get immediate assistance making repairs, saving the cost of flying in experts by helicopter and literally thousands of dollars a minute in lost production.

In India, telepresence solutions benefit and bring immense business value to Global Service delivery organizations in the IT/ITEs segment. Large and widely spread organizations of Indian origin, with multiple offices in India and abroad, can use telepresence to conduct executive meetings, hiring decisions etc.

Nortel is making numerous time and money-saving applications available to customers by combining leading-edge Polycom video and collaboration products with world-class multimedia communications and application services to create an outstanding unified communications experience.

CIOL: How does Nortel see competition from the likes of Cisco, Polycom, Hewlett-Packard Teliris and Codian?

ST: Nortel's unique end-to-end service ensures everyone will lose themselves in the virtual experience.

Nortel's immersive telepresence solutions, provide the user with an end to end solution, in comparison to the competition who approach this from a product centric approach. Nortel ensures the whole solution is fully operational from the moment the end user enters the room. The Nortel dedicated program manager is responsible for all of that, and can stay on-site to sort out any technical issues, before they become service-affecting.

Telepresence from Nortel ensures that an end user automatically receives support and monitoring from Nortel's Multimedia Network Operations Centers (MNOCs), who deliver 24x7x365 global support. These centres operate a 'follow-the-sun' policy, so the end user can be sure their telepresence solution is always working at its best – even if they have the sudden urge to organise a video conference in the middle of the night.

Nortel supplies everything from network design and installation to operation, management, scheduling, and utility-based pricing and service delivery. This makes achieving tangible business results simple and fast. And Nortel is firmly committed to providing the best possible end user experience.