Here are some interesting excerpts from an article published on Friday entitled: Cisco Spotlights Video At Its Partner Summit. The complete article can be found Here at the website of CRN.com. As usual the emphasis is mine.

Cisco Systems is prepping its channel partners to help it drive its next big growth market: video.

Executives spent much of this month's Cisco Partner Summit evangelizing video and the huge role it will play in the vendor's technology and channel strategies going forward.

Cisco President and CEO John Chambers said the networking giant in the coming year will focus on improving collaboration by weaving video into enterprise voice, e-mail and instant-messaging applications, as part of the company's push toward unified communications.

"The majority of interaction between people is going to be video, and partners are going to be the ones driving profitability in this area," Chambers said during a keynote at the conference in San Diego.

Chambers outlined a future in which the ability for workers to communicate and make decisions in groups will speed business processes and spur the development of new apps, such as video collaboration. "The ability to implement loose forms of collaboration, regardless of where people are located, gives you the ability to move as a group and make decisions faster than you could before," he said.

At the foundation of Cisco's strategy is its recently revamped Unified Communications IP telephony lineup. Unveiled earlier this month, it includes native support for SIP, adding presence capabilities, improved mobility features and the ability to support third-party SIP-based phones. Chambers demonstrated communications capabilities that will enable customers to use drag-and-drop features to add video to phone calls, create ad hoc conference calls and collaborate on documents.

Charlie Giancarlo, senior vice president and chief development officer at Cisco, left little doubt about the vendor's intentions. "Over the next few years, Cisco will be a video company,"he said during a keynote address at the partner summit.

Both Chambers and Giancarlo shared a glimpse of Cisco's future video plans for "telepresence," technology set to debut within the next year that promises to provide a more realistic videoconferencing paradigm where life-size, high-definition images populate the boardroom table and voices come from different directions, as if the conference participants actually are sitting in a room together. "Every customer we've showed it to wants it today," Chambers said.

Paulo Del Nibletto's column on the Partner Summit: Letter from San Diego offered this little blurb:

Chambers admitted to ducking my question on the similarities of Cisco's Telepresence and HP's Halo. He added, however that Mark Hurd, the new HP CEO, was doing a great job.

After Chambers it’s Charles Giancarlo, the chief development officer. He tells me that Telepresence will be more of channel play than HP's Halo.

HSL's Analysis:

If I were a Cisco Channel Partner I would be salivating like a rabid St. Bernard right now at the thought of hitting the street with an effective telepresence offering in my portfolio. Here are some thoughts on what makes Telepresence the killer app for the channel:

1. Effective telepresence environments are expensive - The electronics alone in a telepresence group room environments (Codecs, cameras, acoustical pick ups, directional audio/echo cancellation, display technology, premise router, collaborative PC, switch(s), equipment rack, etc. is six-figures per room easy. Let's assume your average Fortune 1000 customer is going to want somewhere between 2 and 50+ group systems depending on the nature of their business, distribution of their workforce, committment to telepresence/video, M&A strategy, etc. and the potential revenue really starts to pile up. If Cisco's final telepresence group system is an engineered environment similar to HP's Halo Collaboration Suite and/or Destiny Conferencing's TeleSuite expect another $10-25K per room for a site visit, architectural plan, and on-site installation, IF Cisco qualifies their channel partners to sub-contract that piece of the work. Add a commission for the on-site maintainence contract, management, and/or network and we are talking about the biggest ticket sales opportunities that these guys have seen in years.

2. There is a year-one ROI for most customers - For most knowledge-centric companies with a distributed work force, telepresence offers a year-one payback in hard-dollar avoided intra-company travel, increased productivity, time-to-market advantage, and all the other benefits that effectively connecting a global organization together at the speed of light offers. If Cisco delivers a solution that offers effective Inter-company collaboration the ROI doubles. That is a big-ticket purchase even the CFO can love.

3. Ginormous Elephant Deals - When Dow Chemical decided to invest in connecting their global organization together using IP videoconferencing in 2001-2003 they went large and built 550+ SPL iRooms using traditional videoconferencing tied together over their global IP Network DowNET. Caterpillar has a network of 300+ videoconferencing systems and the National Information Centre in India has over 330+ locations. With telepresence dramatically improving end-user acceptance and usage over traditional videoconferencing expect more and more Fortune 500 companies to take the plunge. They, obviously, won't be deploying $550K HP Halo Collaboration Suites to 500+ rooms but I expect more cost effective small group solutions like Digital Video Enterprise's Telepresence 50 with life-size images, true eye-contact, and a hidden camera in a lockable cabinet that rolls through a standard size 30" door to nicely compliment the more capable/expensive group systems and proliferate.

Digital Video Enterprises Telepresence 50

4. Effective visual collaboration is the application that justifies upgrading the network - While Cisco keeps innovating in the ability to push more packets with better Quality-of-Service around the LAN and WAN, most organizations are doing fine with what they have. Most applications, video aside, aren't that bandwidth intensive and don't require the incredibly low-to-no latency, jitter, and packet-loss that high-quality, real-time video/telepresence DEMANDS.

While many effective telepresence applications like HP Halo and the Teliris GlobalTable are delivered over each vendor's proprietary overlay network, many security-conscious (I.E. paranoid) corporations are going to insist on running these applications over their own internal networks. It is a lot easier justifying a global network upgrade to the board of directors for cost-effective global collaboration than the fact the network is bottlenecked due to streaming video from the NCAA Final Four. And while the cost of DowNET's 550+ SPL iRooms was rumoured to be in the $50-60MM range, the cost of building and managing the global IP network that supports them was reported to be $1.4 Billion over 7 years!

Would somebody get those Cisco channel partners and resellers a big, thirsty terrycloth towel... They are starting to drool...