Senior Analyst and Partner at Wainhouse Research, Brent Kelly, had these interesting tidbits to report on Cisco's telepresence initiative from VoiceCon in Orlando as reported in this week's Wainhouse Research Bulletin found Here.

Cisco's John Chambers said that he is cutting the company's travel budget by 20% in fiscal 2007. He is trying very hard to get people within Cisco to use the unified communications tools at their disposal, and he is walking the walk in order to get about 20 telepresence centers operational this year.

Brent also reported on this important observation from John Chambers on the productivity that Telepresence and Multimedia provide him over typing:

At VoiceCon, John Chambers, CEO at Cisco Systems, and Gurdeep Pall, Corporate VP at Microsoft, both spoke on Unified Communications. Both companies have recently reorganized and have formed Unified Communications groups. John put a lot of focus on multimedia including telepresence, and he joked that he can type at 40-50 words per minute, but that using multimedia, he can speak at 200! The point being that it is much more efficient for John to communicate using voice or video than using text.

My thoughts: First, get your popcorn on because we are about to see a knife fight at the speed of light between Cisco and Hewlett-Packard on setting "The Standard" in Inter-Company visual collaboration. The key to the race is going to be building a global network of telepresence/effective visual collaboration systems that provide value over and above the ROI received from reducing or eliminating Intra-Company travel alone. The majority of Global Fortune 2000 companies, like Cisco, could whack 20% off their internal travel budgets if they had a solution in place that allowed their distributed workforces the ability to effectively collaborate in real-time.

In fact, a recent survey of 230 European business executives by Interwise found that less than 3 out of 10 business meetings required traditional face-to-face communications (and I would wager that 98+% of those executives have never been in an effective Telepresence meeting environment). The ROI on hard-dollar avoided travel is a small component of the overall benefits that effective visual collaboration provides. Add on: Increased productivity, time-to-market advantage, less wear & tear on road-warriors, business continuity, flexibility (the ability to hold meetings that would otherwise be impossible), and employee health and safety (bird flu) and the ROI becomes huge. Add the ability to effectively collaborate instantaneously with your business partners, vendors, and most importantly Customers (Effective Inter-company Visual Collaboration) and, IMHO, the ROI doubles. Add the ability to connect to cost-effective publicly available telepresence centers located around the world (Public Availability) and the capabilities, advantages, and cost-savings become insane...

Because telepresence/effective visual collaboration solutions are expensive (We are not talking about your Father's set-top videoconferencing system) the early adopters are going to be primarily Fortune 500 companies with deep pockets and far flung outposts. These early adopters are going to want to see the technology working which means demonstration facilities and proven results and Cisco, with a product so early that it can't even be photographed yet, is already at a distinct disadvantage to HP Halo Collaboration Systems with their growing network of global locations including:

Existing Halo Studios
New York City
Washington DC
Corvallis, Oregon
Palo Alto, California
San Diego, California
Houston, Texas
Barcelona, Spain
London, United Kingdom
Rehovat, Israel
Singapore

Halo Studios Under Development
Cupertino, California
Fort Collins, Colorado
Boise, Idaho
Aguadila, Puerto Rico
Leixlip, Ireland
Bristol, United Kingdom
Grenoble, France
Geneva, Switzerland
Boeblingen, Germany
Bangalore, India
Singapore (#2)
Taipei, Taiwan
Shanghai, China
Tokyo, Japan

So while John Chambers is talking about having 20 Telepresence centers in 2006 and cutting the travel budget by 20% in 2007, HP is already more than 1/2 way there TODAY. Even more important, HP has a growing network of customers and partners that can be easily connected to TODAY using the Halo Studio including PepsiCo, DreamWorks, and AMD with more on the way which is increasing the value of the Halo network geometrically with each additional node. Add to the fact that HP is eating its own dog food and collaborating internally at the speed of light and Cisco is looking at some formidable competition.

The HP Halo Collaboration Studio

Cisco needs to get on their bike and pedal, and like I mentioned in the beginning of this post: Get your Popcorn on... It's going to be one hell of a race...