Business Octane's teleALLpresence

Arelatively young company headquartered in Gurgaon, Business Octane is focused on Enterprise Collaboration and Learning domains. It recently launched a slew of 'immersive' high-def video conferencing solutions under the brand name 'Immersive TeleAllpresence'.

Although telepresence is now old, actual deployments in large organizations can be counted on fingers. The foremost reason being the prohibitively high entry costs. Typical deployments for a truly immersive experience run up a bill of a few crores for each location and companies willing to shell out that much must typically be enduring high travel costs to seriously consider one. The selling proposition for such solutions-the promise to provide a truly life-like conference ambience where you're not constrained by technology to compromise on discussions, thus reducing the amount of travel undertaken by top execs. You get, in return, a next-to-real experience, but it needs to be backed up by humongous IT infrastructure that continuously streams high-def video and audio amongst locations separated by geography.

The solutions from Business Octane come in different flavors catering to the needs of mid-size to very large enterprises. Starting at rupees 40 lakhs per location for the basic version to right upto three crores plus for the most 'immersive' solution, you can conference amongst 18 to 600 people at upto 40 locations. However, the costlier the variant you opt for, the more you'll have to provision for bandwidth---upto 16 Mbps per location for the top-end version. We participated in one of the virtual conferences organized at the company's Gurgaon office and observed interactions amongst participants with keen interest. The switchovers between speakers was brisk and the audio effects replicated real life scenarios. The facial expressions and gesturing through hands, sharing of notes through whiteboards and notebooks, had acceptable latency. Prima facie, the solution competes well with those from the more established vendors. However, this demo along with most others we've experienced, was set up amongst metros with negligible resource constraints, so it would be interesting to find out what the experience is like for remote locations. You can get information on the complete range of solutions from the company at www.businessoctane.com.