Here are a couple of stories on John Chambers' keynote speech at Interop in Las Vegas. My excerpts below with links to the full articles. You can find photos and a podcast (and eventually video) of John Chamber's keynote speech at the Inside Interop Blog. Most interesting was Chambers putting the official Cisco telepresence launch and announcement later this year and estimating they won't begin to start shipping systems until "about a year from now" Q2 2007?

Cisco's Chambers Predicts Dawn Of 'Telepresence' by Dan Neel, CRN

An advanced form of teleconferencing dubbed "telepresence" will become common in a year, Cisco Systems President and CEO John Chambers said Tuesday in a keynote speech at Interop Las Vegas 2006.

Telepresence blends high-bandwidth IP communications into a high-resolution video- and voice-conferencing system. Such solutions will be so refined that users will be able to detect subtle nuances in the responses of other participants and follow them around a room, according to Chambers.

Chambers' prediction stems from his vision of "the rise of the empowered consumer and employee." Consumer entertainment technology is creating a culture of people accustomed to getting whatever content they like whenever they want and on the devices they choose, he said. As employees, people also are demanding such capabilities in business technology, and the IT industry will respond by delivering high-end forms of business collaboration, he noted.

"Collaboration is going to be the productivity term for the next decade, and the empowerment of the employee base will drive this," Chambers said.

Three factors will drive this revolution in collaborative technology: unified IP technology, IT networks that work as secure platforms for applications and "the complete virtualization of storage, applications and processors," he said.

Cisco's Chambers Pushes Collaboration, Video By Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service,

Collaboration is the key to enterprises both moving quickly and dealing with the demands of globalization, Cisco President and CEO John Chambers told attendees Tuesday at the Interop trade show in Las Vegas. Advertisement:

Cisco, like other networking vendors, is pushing new systems that combine multiple forms of communication on a single IP network. That approach, including presence information that shows how a contact wants to be reached at the moment, can help an enterprise's departments work together, he said.

"Collaboration isn't about data or video or voice or mobility, it's about how you combine that experience," Chambers said. It will change how enterprises deal with customers and partners and even level the playing field among companies and countries, he said.

The ultimate sales pitch of the keynote, which was free of any major new details on the company's IP communications product lineup, was a sneak preview of what Chambers said would be talking about a year from now: Telepresence. Cisco is working on an enterprise videoconferencing system that will use "life-size" high-definition video and directional sound that makes voices seem to come from where a user is located at a remote site, a company executive said in March at the Cisco Partner Summit. Cisco expects to announce the system later this year and start shipping it in about a year, that executive said.

Chambers gave a few more details. Users will be able to start up a videoconference with "two clicks" using the new technology, and speakers won't have to be followed around with a camera, he said. Though videoconferencing has been hyped before as a way to cut down on travel, Chambers believes the easier-to-use system will help ease that executive headache.

Did he say: Q2 2007??? I have known that Cisco has had a Telepresence Business Unit since someone posted a link to Cisco Superstar Marthin De Beer's speech to the IEEE SCV Signal Processing Society & Audio Engineering Society in San Francisco where his title was listed as "Vice President and General Manager, Commercial Voice and Video Business Unit & Telepresence Business Unit" in September 2004. Assuming that Cisco has been at this since mid-2004 then what is taking so long to ship V1??