Bad economy lifts telepresence sales

When Cisco launched its telepresence technology in 2006, the vendor deployed the equipment internally and paid for it with travel savings, said Erica Schroeder, director of marketing for telepresence at Cisco. “We deployed it for other reasons, but we paid for it out of the travel budget,” Schroeder said. “When we first started selling, companies were first interested in being more competitive – they wanted to scale their experts globally and be more productive. Then we heard about a greener strategy. But the general bumper sticker for telepresence was that it was all about cutting travel dollars. In an environment like today’s economy, collaboration and productivity are much more top-of-mind for people.”

Making video less costly

As the market matures – though it’s still very young – equipment prices are coming down. Tandberg recently announced lower price points for its telepresence gear and Polycom announced lower prices on high-resolution videoconferencing equipment as both try to extend the reach of higher quality videoconferencing to the small and mid-sized business market.

Even with cheaper equipment, companies are trending toward managed services in this economy, Schroeder said. “People are increasingly interested in a managed service offering,” she said. “That way, a carrier like AT&T or BT owns the equipment, and the customer pays a monthly service fee.”

Another option is public telepresence sites. Tata, which owns the Taj Hotel and Tata Communications, is building out public telepresence sites globally that companies can use on a pay-as-you-go basis, Schroeder said. “They are planning more than 100 locations,” she said.

Interoperability key for BT

BT is looking to make telepresence an even more useful collaboration tool by making it easier for companies to communicate with other companies, who may not use the exact same video technology, Prestel said. That’s one of the goals of the new agreement with Polycom.

“Polycom has a large installed base of traditional videoconferencing,” Prestel said. “Polycom’s telepresence gear can interoperate with the traditional equipment, and if that equipment is high-definition, you can do the conferencing in high definition. That gives a company that already has some equipment that they don’t just want to write off the ability to do enterprise-wide telepresence that is high-definition, whether it is in a large immersive room or a videoconferencing room. We can do intercompany communications with Polycom, which gets to the real advantage of collaboration. As long as a company has videoconferencing equipment and we have access to that through an IP number, we can bridge those together to do intercompany videoconferencing, and that is part of what we bring as a service provider.”