Telepresence for Mid-sized Enterprises

Given the slew of benefits that video conferencingbrings in, mid-sized organizations have realized itsimportance and are ready to take off with it. Videoconferencing offers you not only cost savings but also im-proved collaboration, faster decision-making, reduced timeto market for products, faster seizure of business opportu-nities on account of increased strategic time with manage-ment and leadership teams, etc.

Here we discuss about developments happening in thisspace currently for mid-sized businesses and the benefitsthat they could be deriving from these technologies.

Developments in high def video conferencing

Though quite a few organizations have HD-capable systems,only a few organizations have network resources that couldallow HD videos to flow freely. Hence HD was restricted onlyto high-profile users, or senior-management meetings, especially in large enterprises. Polycom, a vendor in this space,has recently announced coding efficiency innovation that ledto support for a standards-based video compression technol-ogy, H.264 High Profile, that reduced the bandwidth require-ments for HD telepresence and standard definition videoconferencing by as much as 50 per cent. Since the technol-ogy, significantly brings down the bandwidth requirements,CIOs who were earlier concerned with the fact that imple-menting video apps might overwhelm their IP networks,could now roll out video conferencing solutions without re-designing their entire network.

H.264 is a well-established and widely implemented stan-dard for video compression, but it is the much simpler and lessefficient H.264 Baseline Profile that was being previously usedfor visual communication applications. Polycom says that theHigh Profile technology is universally applicable to video-en-abled elements in the network. Polycom recently introduceda videoconferencing product called QDX 6000 for the mid-sized businesses. The solution is a full featuredproduct that offers plug and play functionality forsimplified setup and ease of use. It is targeted atsmall deployments and at new users of video con-ferencing as well as at the education and healthcaremarkets. List price of the solution is US $3,999. Theoffering is attractive to mid-size businesses as it en-ables them to leverage public Internet for cost ef-fective IP bandwidth.

Developments in telepresence Telepresence system uses high definition cameraswhich provide feeds into life size HD displays andhigh fidelity acoustics which in a lot of cases local-ize the sound to image, that gives the effect of voicestreaming from the video display of every participant. Special telepresense rooms house these video conferenc-ing equipments that include furniture and displays arrangedin a specific way so as to create a feel that the other participantsare sitting on the other side of the conference table and are ableto maintain natural eye-contact. Mid sized businesses gener-ally do not look at telepresense solutions as they find the de-ployment quite costly and even if they were to think about it, itwould essentially be for senior management. Let us look atsome questions that medium businesses must be asking be-fore going in for telepresence solution.

Telepresence offerings for mid-sized businesses

Mid-sized businesses are now in a stage where they are tryingto understand what benefits can telepresence bring to the or-ganization. Let's look at the offerings.

Business Octane: They have offerings for mid-sized busi-nesses in this space called Immersive Dynamic TelepresenceSuites where, the requirement for bandwidth has come downfurther by 1/3rd, starting as low as one Mbps. Along with con-ferencing, it allows participants to share their desktops andwhite-boards at the press of a button with both local and dis-tant teams. There are three offerings under this — Collabora-tor TurboMax, Collaborator HS and Collaborator Powermax.These 3 suites are fully integrated solutions that include furni-ture and interiors, embedded with complete networking, light-ing, electrical, audio-visual etc. Business Octane has developeda User Interface called SimpliUSE+ that incorporates Telecon-nectWIZARD for connecting multiple locations over its Telep-resence suites or with legacy video conferencing studios andmultiple audio participants added in. So it allows collabora-tion with any kind of video conferencing set-up, whether overIP or over ISDN, anywhere in the world.

Cisco: Cisco offers Cisco TelePresence Commercial Ex-press which combines three infrastructure components —Telepresence Manager, TelePresence Multipoint Switch andTelePresence Recording Server — onto one server usingVMware.TelePresence Manager is a software applicationthat allows one-button-to-push call launch for Cisco TelePres-ence meetings by intelligently automating scheduling andconferencing tasks. And Telepresence Multipoint Switch actsas a video switch as well as a services gateway. As a gateway,the Cisco TelePresence Multipoint Switch can interoperatewith any Multiple Control Unit that supports this protocol.This setup enables customers with older video conferencingsystems to use all the existing equipment and infrastructurewith Cisco TelePresence systems while maintaining the Cisco TelePresence experience for those Cisco TelePres-ence endpoints.The product bundle is delivered as a singleCisco Media convergence server with one or more CiscoTelePresence application DVDs, license keys, and instruc-tions to install the product, including the recommendedVMware configuration. A VMware license is included intheTelePresence Commercial Express license; customersare not expected to purchase a separate license.

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