Telepresence: Ready for its close-up

Managed services can make the telepresence experience nearly fool-proof by handling everything from designing the room and installing the gear to contracting for network services and providing concierge services to set up a company's individual telepresence sessions and monitor them for problems.

While Wainhouse Research stops short of including a managed service in the definition of telepresence, Frost & Sullivan's Dodd argues that it is the managed services wrapper that makes telepresence different from videoconferencing and gives it more of a chance for long-term success.

Overall, the goal is for CEOs to get so comfortable with telepresence that they become anxious to find ways to push the technology down to the masses. Dodd, Gareiss and Weinstein agree that telepresence adoption will drive additional corporate spending on HD and even standard-definition conferencing systems.

Companies providing managed telepresence services range from the vendors themselves (HP and Teliris) to large network operators such as BT and specialty service providers such as Nortel Global Services and iFormata, a spin-off of Destiny Conferencing.

HP and Teliris require customers to purchase managed services in conjunction with the equipment because they believe the service element is crucial for ease of use and for interconnecting companies in business-to-business applications. To ensure quality, HP insists that every telepresence connection on its network be a dedicated DS-3 circuit, whereas most vendors and many service providers believe that MPLS with quality of service (QOS) parameters is sufficient for the telepresence experience, allowing customers to get the most out of their existing network facilities.

“MPLS works well for data, but not for video,” said Mark Gorzynski, Halo chief for HP. “It's a wonderful technology, but when you need low packet loss, it has a bit of a problem. If we could save money by using MPLS, we would.”

Not surprisingly, the folks at Cisco disagree with Gorzynski, and so does Simon Farr, head of marketing convergence for BT Global Services. BT has been using MPLS to deliver a Cisco TelePresence service for about a year. “We've actually engineered a class of service into our MPLS backbone at the access level that is there specifically for Cisco TelePresence,” Farr said. “We can guarantee the application performance end to end.”

Other network operators such as AT&T, Orange Business Services, Sprint, Telus and Verizon Business also are working with Cisco on telepresence services, although not all of the companies are providing managed services yet. Verizon Business, for example, resells and installs the Cisco TelePresence gear and provides network connectivity but leaves management up to the customer.

“We're looking at whether customers need us to help manage it,” said Roberta Mackintosh, executive director of product marketing for Verizon Business. “Right now it's a toss up as to whether they want that.”

Nemertes' Gareiss said her research shows room for both a managed services and company-owned approach to telepresence. “If a company has an MPLS network up and running and has some significant capacity, they can carve out bandwidth at a top QOS level and run telepresence over the network,” she said. “Other companies decide that because telepresence is such a bandwidth-intensive application and because they don't want to risk something going wrong, they'll use a third party so that they can hold that third party liable. I really don't see one taking off over the other. They're both good options.”

What may come before a managed service at Verizon Business is a service that links telepresence systems with traditional videoconferencing systems, Mackintosh said. “I think customers are going to want to connect with sites that don't have immersive solutions,” she said.

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