Can Cisco dominate telepresence without interoperating?

The four-carrier interoperability announcement also advances the efforts to make it possible for companies that have deployed telepresence to move more quickly beyond intra-company communications to linking suppliers, customers and partners, Schroeder said.

“This is something customers ask for,” Schroeder said. “Number one is, ‘Who can I call?’ and number two is, ‘When can I call anyone on any network?’ We’re not there yet. But what we wanted to do with this demonstration is show we are making major progress on the technology front.”

Service providers still need to form business arrangements among one another for inter-carrier telepresence services to work, Schroeder said; that’s not on Cisco’s plate.

In an interview in June, when AT&T announced enhancements to its Cisco telepresence offer including better security for inter-company calls, Alan Benway, executive director of AT&T’s Telepresence solution, said interoperability is key for continuing sales of telepresence but admitted service providers are, to a great extent, dependent on equipment vendors to deliver that.

“We are still at the early stages, because any company can’t call any other company,” Benway said. “[Interoperability] really is a way to add a lot of power to the potential of this technology. There is lots of discussion around, rather than just pure travel savings, how do you work with your ecosystems to build partnerships, collaborate more frequently and on shorter notice than you would otherwise with collaborators? We are moving in that direction.”

The current pace of interoperability by network service providers is enough for Cisco, Schroder said. “I keep saying I’m thrilled at the incredibly rapid pace the carriers are making,” she said. “Telepresence has been in the market not even three years, and already we are seeing major strides in terms of capabilities on the network side to be able to carry high-speed, high-quality service.”