The Telepresence Spectrum

By coincidence, two major players have announced telepresence products this week. Microsoft announced their RoundTable products (due next year) and Cisco has announced their TelePresence range.

 

The Cisco products are interesting in a number of ways. They’ve taken the approach of making the experience of holding a virtual meeting as realistic as possible, using big HD screens and compression technology to make latency as low as possible (a minimum of 150 msec end-to-end). Their top end product (the TelePresence 3000) gives a strong illusion that twelve people are sitting around a single table – but in fact half of the table and six participants are in one location and six are in another location, with the other half of the table. The approach doesn’t come cheap – each end costs $300,000.

 

Microsoft, on the other hand are tackling the low end of the telepresence market, with products predicted to come in at around the $3,000 mark for setting up one end of a teleconference.

 

I think there’s room for both, particularly if they can interoperate, so that, for example, the CEO, seated in her Telepresence meeting room, can address employees gathered in meeting rooms, or seated at their own PCs.

 

In my time in Shell, I had experience of both ends of teleconferencing, with various degrees of success. Even with the high-end systems, though, the experience was far from realistic and too often not trouble-free. Cisco do seem to have pushed the envelope, and it will be interesting to see how well they do in the market against the established players. Cisco themselves are rolling out 110 TelePresence rooms inside their own company.

 

To get an impression of what the Cisco product is like, download or watch Robert Scoble’s video Podcast. It has Guido Jouret, Cisco’s CTO explaining to a group of people what the technology is behind the illusion. For techno-nerds, like me, this was a very interesting video, with Jouret giving a lucid explanation of how the products came about and what the plans are. Fast forward a few years, and this technology will have come down in price to probably a tenth of the cost, and be much more widely available to small companies, and not just the Fortune 100.