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From Telepresence to the Desktop - Video Comes Of Age (The video conference room is dead - long live video conferencing)

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:56:25 -0500

A View From The Road - Special Report: A "milepost" perspective on industry activity and what it means for the future of video collaboration.

By David Danto, IMCCA Director of Emerging Technology

From Telepresence to the Desktop - Video Comes Of Age

The video conference room is dead - long live video conferencing

These are exciting times for those of us in the video collaboration industry. Cisco, one of the largest firms in the high tech world has agreed in principle to purchase Tandberg, one of the leaders in the video conferencing industry. While the deal is not completed and still has some hurdles to overcome, on a scale of one to ten this is a solid fifty in terms of the ramifications it presents to the future landscape of our industry.

In order to understand the magnitude and nuances of this approaching upheaval one first has to look back at the history of video conferencing and telepresence. The IMCCA published a comprehensive background on telepresence in the January 2008 edition of Europe's World Commerce Review which provided an in-depth perspective worthy of review. The state of the industry at that time could be summed up as follows:

·   While traditional video conferencing systems represented (and still represent) 99% of the industry, Cisco's entry into the top 1% of the market (telepresence) was a defining and disruptive moment. None of the other manufacturers or providers had the marketing budget and muscle of Cisco.

·   The legacy manufacturers adopted a "we have telepresence too" stance, very content to increase the sales of their telepresence and traditional video products to the rising tide of customers created by Cisco's marketing.

·   The very compelling message of what telepresence provides had not been challenged. There was little incentive to market against the telepresence concept - the idea that big, expensive, high-quality systems "solved the legacy problems" of past, far less expensive solutions - regardless of the inaccuracies that simplistic thinking created.

·   Telepresence systems were being marketed and sold to senior management in the C-suite, with many of the manufacturers bypassing the traditional video and multimedia experts at customer firms in favor of the executives and IT leaders (who usually weren't video product experts and didn't question the inaccurate marketing message.)

So then one might ask why Cisco would feel compelled to purchase Tandberg. The list of good business reasons is a mile long and many are outside the scope of this article. What had become clear though, even before the deal was announced, was that the telepresence marketing message was being forced to change. Cisco themselves were having an "Animal Farm" moment with their TelePresence product.

Their go to market themes in late 2007 were:

In order to maximize ROI on a video system the equipment needs to be installed in a specially designed, dedicated room expressly for the purpose of video. Utilization of that space would be able to achieve numbers in the 80% to 95% range, justifying the increased spending in equipment, bandwidth and facilities. Life-size images are an absolute requirement. Interoperability with legacy video conference gear would ruin the TelePresence experience.

Their new themes in mid 2009 - even before the Cisco-Tandberg deal was announced - were as follows:

Target utilization levels beyond 50% to 60% percent result in end-user frustration due to an inability to reserve a first choice room and/or time.   There is significant value in lesser priced systems being installed in multipurpose rooms - allowing more people to have access to the video tools (and resulting in even lower utilization). Life-size images are really nice but can be somewhat sacrificed on one end of a call in order to bring video to more users. Interoperability with legacy video conference gear is an absolute requirement.

The message had changed significantly. Everything the legacy video and multimedia professional had said about the emerging telepresence space was shown to be true. This tremendous push into the upper 1% of the market garnered the majority of attention but did not significantly change the reality of video systems as they relate to Metcalfe's law - one has to extend the reach of the video systems to many users - more than the telepresence paradigm allows for - in order for the technology to be widely adopted. While many manufacturers did call their single screen systems telepresence whether or not it was true, the reality was that as these screens continued to get smaller and reach wider deployment, "it really wasn't telepresence any more" (just as we said back in January 2008). For all practical purposes, the term telepresence while having a clear definition in its purest state has really just become a more politically correct method of saying video conferencing.

What will the industry look like going forward?

The coming upheaval will have many effects on the current manufacturers, only some of which can we even attempt to predict.

Cisco and Tandberg have put themselves on an interesting path. The combination has already attracted some creative nicknames from our industry, beginning with the obvious "Cisberg" and including my favorite, the Monty Python homage "Norwegian Blue."   There is tremendous speculation about how this newly combined firm would operate. The Cisco TelePresence related business units are a marketing driven operation, very committed to image, message and executive perception. It is not news that engineering prowess and product reliability were not the most important missions in the TelePresence unit there. In contrast, the team at Tandberg always had product engineering and reliability as mission one. On the equipment side one can surely expect a merging / hybrid strategy for a brief period of time. However, in the long run, the better designed products will win out. (If you need to take a car ride, would you choose to take your Lexus or your Pinto?)   One has to assume that the superior C60 and C90 codecs from Tandberg will eventually be the engines for Cisco TelePresence. More than just better, these engines will allow Cisco to adopt a strategy that allows interoperability from the telepresence room to the desktop and everywhere in between. Cisco will now be equipped with a broad range of video products for every use case. Just think of how the personal video appliances will explode when promoted with Cisco's marketing might. In addition, it doesn't take a psychic to realize that with a few tweaks Tandberg's industry leading management platform, TMS, will be the TelePresence management platform Cisco has needed for a long time.

On the operational side, it has already been announced that Tandberg CEO Fredrik Halvorsen will take over control of Cisco's TelePresence team upon completion of the deal. Fredrik and his management team will likely represent a complete change of direction for Cisco's video group, moving it much further toward an open philosophy that will listen to customers and respond with dialog and solutions. (In fairness to the existing Cisco team, there was only so much responsiveness they could provide while locked into the CTS platforms as their only product. As an example, take a peek at one of Cisco's own compatibility matrix websites, showing just how many of their own TelePresence products and firmware versions don't work amongst themselves.)

For the rest of the firms in the industry, the picture isn't as clear. Much has been said about Polycom in the wake of the announcement. They are now clearly positioning themselves as the only choice for a Cisco independent, open platform video solution. The latest industry research showed them actually retaking the lead in global video system sales by a small margin for the first time in years. Andy Miller (ex. Cisco, Tandberg and IPC) has recently joined their executive team as the head of "global field operations" with a clear mandate to help move them into a market leadership position. Polycom may wind up strengthening their relationships with the independent, "Cisco-hating" firms of the world, or they might be the next buy-out target of another large IT vendor, further consolidating the industry. If that happens one has to wonder how long the remaining independent video manufacturers will be able to survive on their own. Video collaboration is changing from a product industry to a solution industry - and to a lesser extent from a hardware to a software industry. Stand-alone hardware manufacturers are surely on the endangered list.

Radvision is in uniquely difficult circumstances. Cisco has been utilizing their products - specifically the innovative Scopia Bridge - as their gateway MCU for TelePresence to connect to standards based video products. If the Cisco-Tandberg deal is consummated Cisco will surely switch to using the Tandberg owned Codian bridges coming along with the deal. It's hard to imagine how Radvision will replace their largest customer.

Two clear categories of winners in the new video world will be managed service providers and B2B connection / exchange providers. If you haven't noticed everybody and their grandmothers are getting into the services and connectivity businesses. There are two big reasons for this. Firstly, the paranoia of IT risk and security teams has finally defeated any hopes of a simple, universal border control / firewall traversal solution for IP video. Regardless of the fact that there is an industry standard and highly effective method of enabling secure external video for any enterprise (that Tandberg helped in fact create) this standard has not been widely adopted. Tandberg was not an IT vendor, and as an outsider they rarely gained the approvals required to place this technology at an enterprise's secured doorstep. The other reason for the explosion of these businesses is simple - money. Many firms have discovered that selling these B2B connection services (and to a lesser extent services to manage all a firm's endpoints) is a wildly lucrative business. Customers will pay barrels full of cash to buy secure connections on private exchanges and the related services (even though they could have achieved them for free if they made their paranoid security groups back down.)   Look for a continued explosion of offerings in this area.

What will video collaboration look like going forward?

When the Cisco-Tandberg deal is completed and their expanded product catalog offers much more than just rigid telepresence systems we will finally start to see a correction in the over-hyping of telepresence. At this point the video collaboration industry will have been forever changed. The idea of a "video conference room" - meaning a place you have to go to to engage in visual collaboration - will go away, just as the phone booth did when you no longer needed to go somewhere special just to participate in a voice call.

Three paradigms for video will survive: Desktop Video, Telepresence and the Video Equipped Meeting Room.

Corporate executives have certainly embraced telepresence as an excellent system for visual collaboration - in comparison to their legacy equipment. However, no executives are going to prefer going to a shared room they have to wait in line to reserve when they can make a telepresence quality call from a personal 24" screen on their desk. The Cisco-Tandberg deal clearly means that desktop video is about to break-out in a huge manner, far displacing telepresence as the industry darling. Some reasons for this are:

The desktop appliance is far less expensive than the telepresence room

It requires no sunk costs - no "construction dependencies" to activate or utilize

It can be installed, removed and relocated with no loss of investment

Widespread use of them will require a heck of a lot more bandwidth and connectivity within the enterprise (a reality that makes Cisco's network infrastructure people happy I'm sure)

It is personal - requiring no reservation and always available - matching the long sought after promise of "video dial tone"

At the same time, other unified communications vendors are pushing the concept of "free desktop video" through an enterprise's PCs. Microsoft OCS as an example offers "click to connect" escalation of IM sessions to voice and video calls - even HD quality video calls with the right camera. Soon a lot of people will be adopting the desktop video paradigm in a big way, making the need to go somewhere to have a video call a thing of the past.

People will still utilize truly immersive telepresence rooms, but only when they are appropriate - when two groups of people need to meet in face-to-face meetings for extended periods of time. Regardless of what the manufacturers call it, the "one screen telepresence room" will fade away.

This leaves the third paradigm, the meeting room. As stated above you'll no longer go to a conference room just to make a video call. However, if you have a real need for an in person team meeting, and one or more of the required participants can't be in the place where the meeting is being held, video will be available in appropriately equipped rooms to be utilized in much the same manner that the speakerphone on the conference table is today - as a tool to allow this remote site to join. This evolution of conference room video will also bring richer collaboration tools, so teams can share and interact with data and content.

With these three models - Desktop Video, Telepresence and the Video Equipped Meeting Room - we will see the end of the video conference room as we knew it, but at the same time we will see the widespread adoption and continued growth of video throughout our culture and businesses.

Death to the video conference room - long live video conferencing!

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A View From The Road is written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions. David has spent 31 years in the audio visual and broadcasting industries. He has designed facilities for firms such as AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley, NYU and Lehman Brothers. He has recently joined JPMorgan Chase & Company and is the IMCCA's Director of Emerging Technology. Email David at David.Danto.IMCCA@Danto.com

About the IMCCA

The Interactive Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance (IMCCA) is a not-for-profit user application and industry focused association with membership comprised of service and product providers, consultants, and users. Members benefit from the understanding and the use of various interactive and collaborative communications technologies in their professional and everyday lives.

For further information please contact Carol Zelkin, IMCCA Executive Director, at 516-818- 8184 or czelkin@imcca.org. Visit the IMCCA web site at www.imcca.org

PRESENCE 2009 Conference - Update Nov 11th-13th Los Angeles

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:06:36 -0500

PRESENCE 2009 is right around the corner and it looks to be a particularly rich and rewarding conference. In addition to a diverse group of interesting paper presentations, we'll have several demonstrations of telepresence technologies including telepresence conferencing systems from BrightCom and Digital Video Enterprises, true knowledge-building discussion sessions, various social events, and three outstanding keynote speakers:

Barbara Hayes-Roth, an internationally recognized expert in intelligent agents and interactive
characters. She is the former Director of the Adaptive Agents Project and the Virtual Theater Project at Stanford University. She is the founder and President of Extempo Systems which is developing life-like coach-bots to provide personalized one-to-one coaching.

Howard S. Lichtman, founder and President of the Human Productivity Lab, an independent research consultancy that advises organizations looking to invest in telepresence technologies. Mr. Lichtman is the Publisher of Telepresence Options and the editor of the Telepresence Telegraph, the most widely read newsletter following telepresence conferencing, the author of numerous papers and publications on telepresence and telepresence conferencing, and his writings and analysis have been featured in over a dozen national and international publications.

Albert "Skip" Rizzo, Research Scientist and Research Professor at the Institute for Creative
Technologies and Department of Psychiatry/School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California. Dr. Rizzo is the Co-Director of the VRPSYCH Lab at USC which conducts research on the design, development, and evaluation of Virtual Reality systems for clinical assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation.

The full schedule and all the conference details are on the conference website, http://ispr.info/conference.

Telepresence Conferencing Demonstrations include:

The Digital Video Enterprises Telepresence Podium and the BrightCom Lumina L37

PRESENCE 2009 / Telepresence Industry Professionals Dinner - Wednesday, Nov 11th 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM - Marina Del Ray, CA

Academia meets industry at a dinner for PRESENCE 2009 researchers interested in telepresence technologies and Telepresence Industry Professionals. The dinner is open to academics, researchers, and members of the telepresence, videoconferencing, and visual collaboration industries interested in the next generation of telepresence technologies.

Details:

Wednesday Evening, 6:30 PM
Dress: Casual
Economics: Dutch Treat
Hosts: Howard S. Lichtman, Publisher - Telepresence Options
Matthew Lombard, President - International Society of Presence Research

Tony P's Dockside Grill
4445 Admiralty Way, Marina Del Rey, CA
(310) 823-4534
http://www.tonyps.com

Directions Via Google Maps

BT Conferencing Company Profile

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:21:53 -0500

We continue our series profiling the leading firms in the telepresence industry with a profile on telepresence and videoconferencing exchange provider Telx. You can browse our Company Profile archive for previous companies profiled including Teliris, Cisco, Polycom, Glowpoint, TelePresence Tech and others. You can subscribe via RSS or e-mail to receive Company Profiles of other leading telepresence firms as they are published. All the Company Profiles will be published in the upcoming hard copy Telepresence Options 2009 Yearbook which you can receive for free by subscribing here.

BT Conferencing provides exchange service, telepresence managed services, and deployment services. These services include well regarded concierge services, reservation services, network operations services. The most important component of its offer is the video operating system "Onward" which includes capabilities for automatic session launch and operator assist, tools for measuring and reporting operational status of facilities, network devices and proactive responses to faults or alarms in progress. The company has a well architected initiative for internal marketing and user education to stimulate service awareness and session demand.

Included are comprehensive tools for monitoring demand, scheduling and operational satisfaction. With a Video Operations Center in both the USA and UK, BT Conferencing launches more than 60,000 telepresence and video conferencing calls per year

If Telepresence is the Present, 3DPresence is the Future

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:18:09 -0500

By Sagee Ben-Zedeff, Video Over Enterprise

I've been writing about innovation here for a long time. Last week I discussed (more so - complained about) the lack of innovation in the video conferencing experience in the past few years. Well, in this post I will be much more optimistic, and tell you a bit about the state-of-the-art in video conferencing innovation, a project that RADVISION is proud to take part in: 3DPresence.

Einat Yellin, who leads the 3DPresence development effort in RADVISION, was more than happy to share with me the ins and outs of the project.
Telepresence? Try 3DPresence!

I've already discussed here the long-time problem of the "camera-on-top-of-a-TV-set" video conferencing systems, which failed to provide a viable alternative to physical travel. They were replaced by high-end solutions, such as Telepresence, which partially removed some of the shortcomings.

Still, even in the most sophisticated and expensive systems some problems remain unsolved: systems are expensive, systems are not easily scaled, but most of all - experience as they may be - they do not really provide a 3D life-sized representation of the remote party, and eye contact and gesture-based interactions are met in a very limited way. The current state-of-the-art is impressive, but still fails to provide a "natural" impression of the remote conference participants. This is exactly what the 3DPresence projects aims to achieve.

The 3DPresence project was initiated by a consortium of five high-quality partners, bringing together a well-balanced and diverse mixture of industries, research and higher education institutes. The project is part of the Seventh Research Framework Programme of the European Union (FP7).

3DPresence In a Nut-Shell

What 3DPresence proposes is a multi-party, high-end 3D videoconferencing system, that will be able to transmit the feeling of physical presence in real-time to multiple remote locations in a transparent, natural way. This involves accurate representation of physical presence cues, such as multiple user (auto) stereopsis, multi-party eye contact and multi-party gesture-based interaction.

In order to provide the experience of "presence", one of the project goals was to find out what does it really mean to "be there". One of the key elements found was that the physical (geometrical) properties of the rest of the participants should remain as true as possible. This requires 3D representation.

The evolution (some may say - revolution) from 2D to 3D communication is one of the key components of a true tele-presence system, but it is not enough. Keeping eye contact and reproducing the correct gesture perspectives are both crucial for maintaining the non-verbal portion of inter-personal communication.

Even though the 3DPresence project is a research project, it has down-to-earth objectives. The main objective was that the system should be set in a conference room with geometrical restraints. The result, however, is quite different than what you would expect (and learned to know):

3DPresence Multi-Party Video Conferencing Concept

As shown in the figure above, the system consists of 4 displays for each "end point" (2 per external site). The system will allow up to two participants per "end point" and up to 3 "end points" in a conference.

Left: the "virtual" setup of 3 parties (6 participants).
Right: the "physical" setup with 2 local participants and 4 displays

The unique set-up allows maintaining eye contact and gesture awareness, as the displays render two different views of the same remote user per display.

Multi-view and Multi-display

As you may have guessed, all of the above requires unique "features" on the display side. The display for the 3DPresence system, built by Philips, one of the consortium members, is key for the project. Without boring you with too many details, the display is "multi-perspective", which allows it to display different "views" simultaneously to different viewers, depending on their viewing angle. In more technical terms, it is using a set of optical lenses that direct different pixels of the monitor to different viewing angles.

While this is very impressive (just think about yourself watching your favorite soap, while your wife is watching the big Baseball game at the same time using the same screen...), the big challenge when using this technology for video conferencing is to allow participants to move freely in front of the screen, while preserving good picture quality (not switching views too often, refraining from cross-talk of views).The images above, taken from a Philips demo clip, show how 2 perspectives can be viewed on the same screen at the same time: on the left a "left" participant feels he is being "watched", while the "right" participant on the right feels the girl is looking away:

Fiction or Reality?

Live demo of a 3DPresence conference, as captured last week in Berlin

The 3DPresence project may look like science fiction, but it is more of a reality than you may think. RADVISION already hosts a 3DPresence room fully capable of supporting this technology, and last week, in a 3D workshop hosted by HHI Fraunhofer in Berlin, a live demo was presented, connecting the 1st ever 3DPresence conference.

The project will end in Mid 2010. Until then, it will focus on enhancing quality and efficiency of the different algorithms involved, while working on interoperability with existing "legacy" systems (2D).

Although this sounds just around the corner, Einat clearly mentions that all the technologies involved - 3D video acquisition, display, coding and transmission - are still relatively new, and there's a long way to go from prototype, impressive as it may be, to a commercial product.

Still, this innovation may lead the way to an as-close-to-real-life-as-possible video conferencing experience, which may offer a real alternative to in-person meetings without any drawbacks. When thinking about where our industry can, and should, go, I would really bet my chips on Einat and the 3DPresence project.

[via blog.radvision.com]

TANDBERG Launches new T1 Small Group Telepresence System

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:07:39 -0500

The TANDBERG T1 Small Group Telepresence System

This week TANDBERG launched an updated version of the TANDBERG T1 small group telepresence system. The system has two primary seats and is designed to inter-operate with the TANDBERG T3 group system. The new T1 has the same innovative touchscreen interface as the T3 that allows participants to launch ad-hoc calls, bring in additional site, change screen layouts, and perform other conference control functions. You can read TANDBERG's official press release on the T1 Here.

The new and improved T1 is designed for executives working at satellite offices and requires about 50% of the space of a TANDBERG T3. Pricing is $139,000 for the base model which includes the camera, screen, table, and touch screen interface. The environmental buildout including acoustical wall treatments and nordic blue background adds $36,000. Options include two leather chairs $7,000 and a ceiling mounted document camera for $15,900. The T1 uses the same C90 codec engine as the T3, is capable of 1080p high resolution video, and requires 5.5MBps of bandwidth if operating at the highest possible video quality. TANDBERG has started taking orders for deliveries and general availability in Q1 2010.

The view connected to another TANDBERG T1 and two TANDBERG T3 Systems

Cisco HealthPresence Update with Video Showing Cisco's Vision

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:37:30 -0500

From the Telepresence and Videoconferencing Insight Newsletter

An update on Cisco's HealthPresence initiative in Argentina with Telepresence Options Publisher Howard Lichtman's thoughts on telepresence in healthcare and the potential for choice it could bring.

5 October 2009. The second phase of a Telemedicine pilot project, led by the Prof. Dr. Juan P. Garrahan Pediatric Hospital, Cisco and Telefónica, in cooperation with Castro Rendón Hospital has started. This multiphase project is geared to offering remote health care support and services in different provinces of the Argentine Republic.

This initiative is part of the Garrahan Hospital's Telemedecine Reference and Counter-reference Program, which has been taking place for more than 12 years in partnership with the Garrahan Foundation. The program is managed by the Communications at a Distance Office, which delivers remote support for diagnosis via e-mail, fax and telephone to more than 70 hospitals in Argentina.

The telemedecine pilot, enabled by Cisco® collaborative technologies such as Cisco TelePresence (tm) and Cisco Unified Communications, will enhance doctor-patient interactions over a distance; support diagnoses in complex cases in remote and budget-constrained hospitals; optimize the hospital's resources; and underpin a more collaborative process in terms of procedures, prevention programs and medical treatment, all within a highly secure and effective environment.

The Telemedicine pilot project, based on the concept of Connected Health by the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), promises to be an innovative way of optimizing and elevating the Telemedicine experience for health professionals and patients in Argentina and the rest of Latin America.

The Telemedecine pilot project with Cisco includes three phases: The first phase within the Garrahan Hospital was designed to test the Cisco TelePresence technology and provide training to doctors. The second phase involves connecting the Garrahan Hospital and Castro Rendón Hospital, located about 1,400 kilometers away in the Neuquen province in the Argentinean Patagonia, through Telefonica's network. The last phase will provide coverage to the main medical centers that participate in the Communications at a Distance program of Garrahan Hospital, including the most southern area of the country.

Telefónica is providing connectivity through its national network for the Garrahan Hospital and Castro Rendón Hospital in Nequén.

The program is focused on two main goals: One is that patients from any part of the country will be able to obtain excellent medical care with the possibility of having consultations and appropriate referrals. And the second is guaranteeing access to medical care from the place of residency, in order to be able to continue with control and necessary follow-ups to receive the specialized care for pathologies that require immediate or short-term treatment.

"Prof. Dr. Juan P. Garrahan" S.A.M.I.C. Pediatric Hospital is a high- complexity public hospital which provides medical care to newborns, children and adolescents between the ages of 0 and 15 years. Due to its characteristics, the level of training of its personnel and its equipment, it is considered to be a national reference center for the diagnosis and treatment of the most complex childhood pathologies. Medical care is free for patients and the Hospital receives its budget from public funding provided by the National Government and the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, and from invoicing for services for charitable work and private medical care.

HSL's Thoughts and Analysis

"Everything great and intelligent is in the minority" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This is one of the most exciting potential areas for telepresence. Most folks are stuck with whatever allopathic AMA monopoly medical practitioner is closest to them that their insurance accepts and many AMA doctors are simply salesmen for the pharmaceutical industry pushing dangerous vaccines and addictive drugs on an unsuspecting public. I am a fan of natural healing, naturopathic medicine, and the orthomolecular school of medicine which posit that the key to heath is returning the body to biochemical stasis (removing refined sugar, white flour, unnecessary pharmaceuticals, dangerous vaccines, caffeine, and anything else that would interfere with the body's natural immune system and inhibit optimum health). The problem is that holistic, orthomolecular natural healers are few and far between. If telepresence in healthcare opens up choice among physicians in a wide number of disciplines then I see the potential for much good. If telepresence in healthcare limits the options to a handful of AMA allopathic monopoly medical practitioners then that would be bad. I would hope Cisco would push to see that widest array of medical alternatives is supported so that the reputation of telepresence in health care isn't tarnished right off the bat.

Solution Snapshot: Polycom TPX HD 306M

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:16:52 -0500

We continue to add to our Solution Snapshots Catalog of the leading telepresence systems, managed service providers, and inter-networking solutions. These detailed Solution Snapshots feature important information for those evaluating their Telepresence Options including: minimum bandwidth required, minimum space required, and inter-operability information. Solution Snapshots feature information not found any place else on the internet including top-down floorplans showing minimum space required for each telepresence system for architects, engineers and facility professionals trying to determine the best location to deploy telepresence environments. You can received new Solution Snapshots as they are published by subscribing to our RSS Feed or via e-mail. All the Solution Snapshots will be published in the upcoming hard copy Telepresence Options Yearbook which you can receive for free by subscribing here.

Overview: Whether you want to facilitate collaboration in a dispersed product development team or quickly reach mission critical decisions, Polycom TPX HD solutions bring an immersive telepresence experience to small or medium venues and allow up to 6 participants per room to be virtually connected to other small or medium teams around the world. Available in many configurations, the Polycom TPX HD solution is ideal for applications such as executive meetings, project management, client engagements or partner collaboration.
The easy-to-use Polycom TPX HD solutions allow you and other participants to focus on your meeting topics, not the technology, while communicating naturally and effectively. Polycom TPX HD meetings rely on true-to-life video, spatial audio, and interactive elements all within a specially designed environment that promotes realistic interaction with all meeting participants.

Cisco to Buy TANDBERG for $3.0 Billion, What it Means, and Why I Publicly Predicted it 7 1/2 Months Ago

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:59:09 -0500

Cisco announced today that it will acquire telepresence and videoconferencing equipment provider TANDBERG for almost $3 billion in an all cash offer. The Wall Street Journal reported that the announcement sent shares of Tandberg (TAA) trading up 15.70 Norwegian kroner, or 11%, at NOK154 by 0731 GMT. This was a 25.2% premium to the 3-month volume weighted average closing price for TANDBERG's stock.

Cisco CEO John Chambers and TANDBERG CEO Fredrik Halvorsen discuss the Acquisition

Cisco is offering NOK153.50 a share, valuing Tandberg's total share capital at NOK17.2 billion ($2.97 billion). TANDBERG reported revenue of $809 million in 2008 and competes with Cisco in the market for telepresence and videoconferencing solutions including Telepresence Group Systems, Videoconferencing Systems, and Video Network Infrastructure. Cisco has reported that Cisco TelePresence is the company's fastest growing product line ever with 350 organizations deploying over 2500 TelePresence Systems since the product's launch in October of 2006.

Demonstrating the potential of telepresence technology in managing multi-national enterprises, Cisco has deployed over 608 telepresence systems internally reducing their internal travel budget by 50% and saving, by their estimate, over $400 million in hard and soft costs.

Cisco has begun a major push to expand the ability to connect Cisco TelePresence systems among disparate organizations to enable Inter-company business between organizations that deploy TelePresence and their partners, vendors, and customers. The company has signed up some of the world's largest telecommunications carriers and Managed Service Providers including AT&T, BT, Orange, NTT, Tata Communications, Telefonica, Telstra, Telmex, and just yesterday announced a deal where IBM will provide managed services for Cisco TelePresence.

It is reported that TANDBERG will be integrated into the Emerging Business Technology Group which developed Cisco TelePresence under Cisco Senior Vice President Marthin DeBeer where TANDBERG CEO Frederick Halvorsen will lead a newly formed business called the TelePresence Technology Group.

Howard Lichtman's Thoughts and Analysis

On February 11th, 2009 I speculated publicly that Cisco would probably acquire TANDBERG. Here is the logic of the business case that I took one of our consulting clients, a buy/sell side hedge fund, through in April of 2009:

1. TANDBERG fills out Cisco's Telepresence and Visual Collaboration Portfolio while Removing and Co-opting their #1 Competitor
While Cisco has been able to drive an amazing amount of sales for what is essentially a V 1.5 telepresence offering with "OK" environmentals, it could have driven substantially more if it had a more complete product line with better interoperability at higher qualities with traditional videoconferencing systems. While TANDBERG was late getting into the telepresence game, they have been catching up quickly with their T1 / T3 telepresence offerings and broad visual collaboration portfolio and have been hitting on all cylinders as an effective marketing and sales organization.

The TANDBERG acquisition gives Cisco:

High Quality, Lower Cost End-points - A wide variety of more cost-effective videoconferencing endpoints with excellent native inter-interoperability with traditional standard-based videoconferencing end-points. TANDBERG boasts a complete product portfolio that extends video capabilities from high-end telepresence end-points to group systems to desk top applications to video phones to laptops and mobile devices.

Video Network Infrastructure & Video Network Management-In 2007 TANDBERG acquired Codian the leading manufacturer of vendor neutral HD video network infrastructure. That acquisition allowed TANDBERG to lock up a vendor neutral platform that they could then tightly integrate with their endpoints and management platform AND took the largest and most sophisticated engineering team working on video network infrastructure off the market blocking some folks who are probably still kicking themselves right now. The TANDBERG/Codian platform had quickly becoming the defacto standard for telepresence and videoconferencing managed service providers who must manage multiple HD video streams and connectivity between multiple platforms. The company also expands their portfolio of video network management tools with TANDBERG's respected TANDBERG Management Suite which simplifies the management of large telepresence and videoconferencingdeployments to TANDBERG's firewall traversal technology to recording-archiving-streaming.

2. The TANDBERG Acquisition Allows Cisco to give HP, Avaya and Microsoft the Shiv!

Talk about kicking your competitors where it hurts... TANDBERG had a key partnership with HP in visual collaboration where HP was filling in the gaps of their own telepresence and visual collaboration portfolio in essentially the same areas outlined above and Microsoft and Avaya had key partnerships in Unified Communications. With HP Halo, TANDBERG was acting as a sales channel for the sale of HP's managed services for telepresence and videoconferencing including the $100MM+ HVEN network that I advised them to abandon in 2005. HP loses essentially their entire R&D investment in time and treasure and their #1 sales channel for managed video services, a portion of their roadmap for the next generation of HP Halo offerings, and the key supplier for the camera and codec in their offering is now their #1 competitor.

Microsoft and Avaya had partnerships with TANDBERG where they were integrating videoconferencing elements into their Unified Communications (UC) offerings. Since Cisco is a direct competitor with both Microsoft and Avaya in UC I am assuming that this work will be coming to a grinding halt...

3. Cisco Seizes the Most Successful Management Team, Sophisticated R&D Organization, and Valuable Intellectual Property Portfolio in Visual Collaboration.
In June while accompanying a group of European and American investors on a tour of telepresence and videoconferencing companies led by Anita Huun of Handelsbanken, I was introduced to a concise piece of wisdom from Guido Jouret, the CTO of the Emerging Technologies Group at Cisco: "Where there's mystery, there's margin". I can think of only a handful of industries where this holds as true as telepresence and visual collaboration. Encompassing the arcane sciences of codec transcoding, telepresence environmental design, wire-speed video network infrastructure, true QoS inter-networking, and a variety of other technical specialties that make the brain hurt just pronouncing their names. Cisco inherits a rich tradition of technological innovation, a superb R&D organization, a compelling portfolio of intellectual property, and the most professional and accomplished management team in the industry led by Fredrik Halvorsen. TANDBERG has been posting double digit YOY revenue growth since Mr. Halvorsen took over the reigns as CEO in December of 2005.

4. Cisco Turns Their Pile of Rapidly Depreciating Fiat Paper Tickets Into Real Assets
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Cisco war chest is down to a still impressive $13 billion after spending "almost $22 billion to buy back nearly 900 million of its own shares over the past three fiscal years through late July". In a similar vein to the advice we give our consulting clients that are "US dollar rich" (Turn your rapidly depreciating fiat paper tickets into an ability to collaborate globally with business partners, vendors, and investors without physical travel). I think it makes good business sense for Cisco to turn its depreciating paper tickets into assets during a time when the US Dollar is under considerable stress from declining tax revenue, sky rocketing budget deficits, stealth monetization of sovereign debt, exposure of the Fed's manipulation of the gold market, and foreign investors abandoning US equites, corporate paper, and sovereign debt. Furthermore, they will be able to make this acquisition with off-shore dollars avoiding the tax hit that a domestic purchase would have required.

It was for these reasons (and others) that I predicted that Cisco would buy TANDBERG in February of 2009. I thought that telepresence and videoconferencing equipment maker LifeSize Communications might have been a less expensive option but was speculating openly that TANDBERG was the best fit. My comment about $35MM to do publicly available telepresence right in the quote refereed to the Human Productivity Lab's business model for a global network of publicly available telepresence conferencing centers, Powwow Virtual, that Entrepreneur Magazine will be profiling in its next issue.

Other Thoughts and Analysis

Who Wins

Cisco's TelePresence Customers and Partners- Many of whom have been sweating over Cisco's lack of a more sophisticated strategy around inter-operability, lower-cost, higher quality end-points, and telepresence exchange.
John Chambers - Gets the missing pieces of the puzzle to complete the vision
Marthin DeBeer - That guy is building quite an empire... Good thing he has telepresence
Fredrik Halvorsen - Big payday, global recognition, and resources for expansion
Cisco Systems Integration and Managed Service Partners Skilled in Both Cisco & TANDBERG - IVCi, Dimension Data, IBM, Glowpoint, York Telecom, and BT Conferencing immediately spring to mind

Who Hurts (Besides HP, Avaya, and Microsoft)

RADVISION - OEM partner for many of Cisco's existing video network infrastructure solutions.

The Rest of the Telepresence and Visual Collaboration Industry - Better get on your bikes and peddle friends... Cisco and TANDBERG are going to be a formidable competitor...

About the Author
Howard Lichtman is the President of the Human Productivity Lab, an independent consultancy focused on telepresence and effective visual collaboration for organizations looking to improve productivity and reduce costs. The Lab provides corporate clients with acquisition consulting, RFI/RFP creation, and ROI/TCO financial modeling on telepresence systems, telepresence managed services, and inter-networking telepresence. The Lab also provides investors with prescient insight into the rapidly growing telepresence industry. Mr. Lichtman is also the publisher of Telepresence Options, the #1 website on the internet covering telepresence technologies.

IBM Launches Managed Services for Cisco TelePresence

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:58:23 -0500

IBM jumped into the market for telepresence managed services with both feet on Wednesday with an announcement that it is rolling out managed services for Cisco TelePresence. The announcement states their offering will include design, implementation, concierge and help desk, integration with client calendaring application, remote operations, and maintenance and support. IBM Global Financing will also offer flexible billing and payment options. In this article by Larry Barret of InternetNews, IBM claims it already has 250 Cisco TelePresence certified technicians.

IBM Cisco TelePresence Press Release
Made in IBM Labs: IBM Creates Software for Holding Face-to-Face Meetings in Virtual Worlds
IBM Debuts "Virtual Mirror" Kiosks For Hair and Makeup Help
Cisco and IBM Enhance Banking Experience With Cisco TelePresence and Optimized Self-Service

IBM Serves Up Cisco TelePresence Service

September 30, 2009
By Larry Barrett, via InternetNews.com

IBM on Wednesday debuted a new managed telepresence service for companies that want to take advantage of Cisco's high-definition video and voice-conferencing technology, but don't want have to deal with all the pesky maintenance and support issues the high-end equipment requires.

Cisco's (NASDAQ: CSCO) TelePresence suite -- which can range from a single camera and monitor up to multiple cameras in dozens of worldwide locations with images displayed on enormous screens with duplex and directional sound -- was first introduced in 2006, but IBM (NYSE: IBM) was actually test-driving the technology long before it was released as a commercial product.

"We have been experiencing the value of this technology for years," Marisa Viveros, vice president of IBM's integrated communications services group, told InternetNews.com. "We've been working with Cisco for a couple years doing design, consulting and integration. Now we're delighted to offer this managed service where we can integrate, operate and maintain this technology for our clients."

Viveros said new customers can now expect IBM services group to provide proactive and reactive maintenance, including upkeep on all the cameras, monitors, conference room furniture, IP handsets, telecommunications equipment and software needed to pull off a multi-continent video conference.

"We've been using this technology for business reviews, executive meetings and education sessions for some time," Viveros said. "Our clients are seeing similar value, particular in terms of collaborating on research and development projects. In HD, you get immediate feedback of body language and facial expressions."

IBM boasts more than 250 technicians certified on Cisco TelePresence. The concierge service, Viveros said, will be especially helpful to new or existing customers who just can't seem to get the system up and running just as the conference is about to begin and the adrenaline is flowing fast.

As any CEO of a major airline or hotel chain can attest, the moribund economy represents a fantastic opportunity for tech firms offering a thrifty alternative to business travel. Networking vendors, as well as companies that combine collaboration and video software functionality, are particularly well positioned.

Gartner earlier this year predicted that high-definition based video meeting technology will replace more than 2.1 million airline seats each year, erasing roughly $3.5 billion in travel and lodging expenses for large businesses.

"The challenge of the current economic conditions demands that every organization revisit the need for face-to-face meetings," said Gartner analyst Steve Prentice. "Companies should put aside previous prejudices and bad memories of older video-conferencing services and seriously investigate these new technologies."

Cisco said it expects to save at least $174 million in fiscal 2009 by using its own collaboration and TelePresence product.

Cisco competes with the likes of Polycom, Tandberg and LifeSize in the fast-growing telepresence market.

IDC analyst Abner Germanow told Interop attendees this spring that 2009 would be "the year of the great enterprise video experiment," with companies embracing "Skype to full telepresence and everything in between."

The September Edition of the Telepresence Options Telegraph Newsletter

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:12:54 -0500

We have just published the August issue of the Telepresence Options Telegraph, our newsletter that covers telepresence technologies and the telepresence industry. We have moved from an HTML newsletter to a downloadable PDF which we believe makes for a more exciting and visually impactful publication. It also has greatly simplified the production of the newsletter so you can expect to see the Telegraph published on a more regular basis. You can subscribe to the Telepresence Options Telegraph Here: http://www.telepresenceoptions.com/syndication/

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE TELEGRAPH AS A PDF

The September issue features:

Telepresence Options Growth

The PRESENCE 2009 Conference

Videoworks, Poltrona Frau, and LifeSize Communications Create "Pop Up" Custom Telepresence Solutions

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

BrightCom Launches Lumina line of Telepresence and Webconferencing Solutions

Avatar - Biological Alien Telepresence Headed to the Big-Screen in 3-D

Telepresence Robotics Hits the Big Screen - Is the Movie "Surrogates" Getting Closer to Reality?

The Reality of Robot Surrogates

A New Company Profile - Telx

New Solution Snapshots

- Telx Video Exchange
- Polycom RPX HD 400 Series
- Glowpoint - Managed VNOC Services
- Cisco TelePresence System 1300
- Glowpoint - Telepresence interExchange Network (TEN)
- The TelePresence Tech TPT 4000
- Cisco 3200 TelePresence System

New Telepresence Videos from HSL's YouTube Channel

Telepresence New Articles and Stories
Telepresence Industry Press Releases

Telepresence Industry Deals - Cisco wins The University of Queensland and Takeda, LifeSize Communications signs AMD, Glowpoint and AVI-SPL win SilverLake,

Odds & Sods - Q2 - 09 Videoconferencing Industry Stats from Wainhouse, AT&T expands TelePresence to Mexico, LifeSize signs TT Group Communications, Conferencing Advisors makes the INC. Magazine 500 list of fastest growing companies, Videocall named Polycom Telepresence VNOC Provider, FiberLight takes HSL to lunch, LifeSize and Glowpoint revenue,

Telepresence People - Aaron Roe moves to Deloitte, Ron Riesenbach, Mahmoud J. Al-Daccak, Thomas Haider, John Vitale, Stephen Epstein, Yoav Nativ, Christopher Jacobs, Mark J. DeFilippis, Walter Horsting, and HSL as Cagefighting Ringmaster

Telepresence Industry Professionals (TIP) - New York City Get Together, Tip over 945+ members

Telepresence Industry Jobs - Over a dozen new jobs!

On The Bench - A Breakdown of Industry Talent in the Market for their Next Opportunity

and More!

You can subscribe to the Telepresence Options Telegraph Here: http://www.telepresenceoptions.com/syndication/

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE TELEGRAPH AS A PDF