Cisco Going Wide with TelePresence

April 07, 2009

By Laurence Cruz

When Michael Keithley saw Cisco TelePresence in action for the first time, the chief information officer at the legendary Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles was "absolutely blown away" by the immersive nature of the experience.

"The technology melts away and very quickly you forget that the virtual attendees are 3,000 miles distant," Keithley says.

But as the gold standard for virtual "in person" meetings, Cisco's TelePresence systems don't come cheap, even by corporate standards. For most small companies? Impossible.

But now, a little more than two years after Cisco released its first suite of TelePresence systems, the networking colossus has launched a second wave of offerings aimed at democratizing the technology. The new releases include Cisco TelePresence for general-purpose conference rooms and for companies of all sizes – both firsts. They also include the ability for TelePresence to run over lower-bandwidth connections without compromising the quality of the experience, company executives say.

To help companies do more with existing video investments, Cisco also launched two new applications – one allowing customers to turn a TelePresence unit into a high-definition recording studio at the touch of a button, and another making it easier for event managers to use TelePresence for large-scale events such as company meetings and keynote addresses. Finally, Cisco introduced enhancements that allow high-definition and standard-definition video conferencing sessions to interoperate with Cisco TelePresence sessions.

"This is TelePresence for everyone," says Charles Stucki of Cisco's TelePresence Systems business unit. "It enables many types of uses, many types of companies over many types of networks, interoperating not just with video conferencing but with call centers, health center applications and digital media systems."

Virtual Deals, Real Benefits

In some ways, Cisco could not have picked a better time to take its TelePresence technology to a wider audience, says Nora Freedman, a senior analyst at research company IDC.

"With the economy on the ropes, many companies have gone from travel reduction to no travel at all," Freedman says. "So what can you do if you have no travel budget, but still need to have meetings and collaboration sessions?"

At Creative Artists Agency, using TelePresence instead of putting people on planes has become an everyday way of doing business. The agency, which represents many of the top names in entertainment and sports, installed Cisco TelePresence units at its headquarters in Los Angeles and its New York office about a year ago.

"It gets used constantly," Keithley says of the technology, which collapses the distance between east and west coasts literally at the touch of a single button, bringing agents, clients and others together for virtual meetings – sometimes on the spur of the moment.

Keithley recalls a time when, days after the TelePresence systems were installed, a baseball agent was unable to fly from New York to Los Angeles to take part in a client meeting. No problem: the meeting was held over TelePresence instead.

"When travel comes up, one of the first questions is, 'Can't you do this over a TelePresence discussion?'" Keithley says. "And the answer often is, 'Yes, I can.'"

A Game Changer

Creative Artists Agency's two TelePresence units together seat up to 12 people – half of them virtually. The value, Keithley says, has been "huge."

Not only does the technology enhance the agency's agility – thanks to speedier and richer information sharing – it also facilitates faster decision-making because people can judge reactions and focus on issues more quickly, Keithley says. Add to that the greater intimacy among colleagues and others, as well as the time and money savings, quality-of-life improvements and environmental benefits of less flying, he says.

It's the fidelity of the Cisco TelePresence experience that truly sets it apart. Virtual participants appear as life-size images on ultra high-definition video screens with three-dimensional spatial sound. Cameras are positioned to create a completely believable illusion of eye contact. Even the furniture creates a semblance of a single oval table. It's a feat of trompe l'oeil.

Little wonder that Creative Artist Agency's TelePresence unit in Los Angeles gets used about 100 times a month on average. That's more than all of the office's two-dozen state-of-the-art high-definition video conferencing systems put together, Keithley says.

"The traditional video conferencing systems are so complex that the business users almost always need some kind of meeting support or IT help," he says. "Cisco TelePresence is a game changer. It's a quantum leap in quality and ease of use, and it's rock-solid. It just works."

A TelePresence Unit in Every Home?

Cisco's long-term vision is to have TelePresence units in every home, office and conference room, as well as in healthcare, retail, manufacturing, education and other industries, and in virtualized scenarios such as stage presentations, conferences and sports interviews, Stucki says.

"We expect TelePresence to be everywhere," he says. "We think this is really going to pervade and change society as completely as the Web did, but in a different way."

Cisco TelePresence continues to be the company's fastest-growing new product category – a fact that seems to have leavened the video conferencing market as a whole. Analysts say the market has gained momentum since Cisco launched its first wave of TelePresence systems in fall 2007, doubling in growth rate to about 20 percent.

With the most recent releases, Cisco hopes to gain even more market share. TelePresence for the general-purpose conference room, for example, is itself a multi-billion dollar market, Stucki says. The first product in this new category retains the essential features of the existing three-screen systems – multiple cameras and life-size images of virtual attendees, for instance – but it uses existing conference room tables and is quick to install, so it's low cost to deploy, Stucki says.

And, he says, with the ability to run TelePresence over bandwidth connections as low as 1.5 megabits per second, remote offices, branch offices and even teleworkers can now experience TelePresence for the first time.

Don't Call it Video Conferencing

There are challenges, too. Stucki says there are signs that the market has slowed in the last two quarters, even though Cisco itself appears to have escaped unscathed so far.

And IDC's Freedman says that, while the souring of the economy on one hand underscores the business value of TelePresence today, in some cases it may undercut it.

"Companies that are particularly hard hit just need to make the bleeding stop," she says, "so TelePresence may not make their top three spending priorities."

One of the more intractable challenges Cisco faces comes from a traditional buyer community that has seen a few too many glitches with video conferencing systems, and lumps Cisco TelePresence into the same category, Freedman says.

"This is not the video conferencing experience of yesteryear; this is TelePresence for the future," she says. "But there's always going to be someone who turns the conversation back to a negative experience they had in the past."

Seeing is Believing

Stucki says Cisco's strategy for dealing with this issue is a simple one: When people see Cisco TelePresence and how it can transform their business, they simply want it – just as they want the iPhone or iPod.

For his part, Keithley says Creative Artists Agency plans to install additional TelePresence units in its other offices around the globe, starting with London and Beijing. And he says he's watching the new crop of offerings from Cisco with great interest to see where the agency might deploy additional TelePresence products and services.

"There's no one who wouldn't benefit from this," he says.

Laurence Cruz is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.