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The HPL Interview: Marc Trachtenberg, CEO and Steven Gage, COO of Teliris and HSL's thoughts on Telepresence vs. Executive Aviation

May 21, 2006 | HSL

Teliris Video Still 1.jpg
Click on the Image above or Here to watch the Interview

In early April had the opportunity to sit down with Marc Trachtenberg, CEO, and Steve Gage, COO, of Teliris at their new and expanded offices in New York City. The company is the current commercial leader in effective visual collaboration as measured by the number of customer systems deployed globally, has a reported $40MM backlog of orders, and a 4th generation system that will be released this summer. With HP and Cisco entering the field of telepresence and effective visual collaboration Teliris seems ideally situated as the big boys validate a market that has been the best kept secret in telecommunications for years at the same time that geopolitical events and the dramatic rise in the price of oil make alternatives to physical travel more attractive than ever. We spoke with Marc and Steve about the history of the Teliris, who is using the Teliris GlobalTable solution and why, and their views on the future of telepresence and effective visual collaboration.

First a couple of the key take-aways from the interview:

  • The Teliris customer base represents a diverse cross-section of industries from financial firms to pharmaceutical to media companies that are looking to address the same fundamental problems:

  • The ability to communicate across their broad organizations that are dispersed around the world with limited facilities, limited capabilities, and limited people.

  • They are looking to take cost out of their businesses.

  • According to Marc, the Teliris GlobalTable solution is generating a positive ROI by reducing international travel by as little as one international trip per month, per room.

    Teliris GlobalTable Empty Low Res#1.jpg

  • Another common theme is GlobalTable customers using the system to enhance their capabilities. Marc cited the specific examples of consultants meeting with customers across long distances and pharmaceutical companies putting together creative labs to facilitate research and development.

  • Marc also cited the ability to hold productive ad-hoc meetings as a key capability driven by the need to communicate "across the table as if they were sitting there" regardless of distance.

  • Steve Gage volunteered another common thread running through the customer base: Teliris customers initially evaluate the GlobalTable solution making assumptions on usage and capabilities using traditional videoconferencing as a benchmark and believe that experience will be essentially the same albeit a little better than videoconferencing.

    As customers adopt the GlobalTable solution they discover that the reliability and quality of the experience allow them to fundamentally change the way they do business given the new capabilities. This dynamic is reflected by an increase in both the number and duration of GlobalTable meetings relative to their previous usage of traditional videoconferencing.

  • Marc believes that the industry is in a sea change moving from the innovators and early adopters that had a budget to kick the tires with small trial deployments to full scale deployments by more technology cautious customers that have become comfortable with making the investment from the positive feedback they are getting from the innovators and early adopters. Sales growth is being driven by the demonstrated increase in usage, an improvement in the types of meetings that are possible (I.E. board meetings, customer meetings that wouldn't have been done using traditional videoconferencing), and positive feedback from the early adopters.

    Teliris Virtual Vectoring.jpg

  • Marc described Teliris' VirtualVectoring technology as the ability to have a "roundtable" look and feel to a multi-point meeting as a combination of hardware, software, and systems that makes possible a unique three-dimensional experience.

  • Marc provided some interesting insight with respect to sizing the market for telepresence and effective visual collaboration solutions looking at the conversion rate of traditional videoconferencing systems to telepresence and effective visual collaboration solutions. Where initially the conversion rate was 1-2% of existing videoconferencing systems (I.E. a company with 200-300 traditional videoconferencing endpoints might kick the tires of telepresence and effective visual collaboration with 2-3 systems in their key locations), Teliris is now seeing conversion rates approaching 10%. New customers are skipping kicking the tires and deploying systems to more initial locations and their existing early adopters are ordering additional systems.

  • The simplicity and reliability of the Teliris solution is changing the way that conferencing/visual collaboration is perceived within the organization. Where previously videoconferencing was viewed as an activity that had to be scheduled in advance, the ability to easily and reliably schedule ad-hoc meetings is leading clients to hold GlobalTable meetings on short notice much the same way they would have previously picked up the telephone. Steve estimated that over time customers achieve a blend of between 30-50% of meetings on an ad-hoc basis and 50-70% of meetings that have been scheduled in advance.
  • Marc believes that one of the key advantages that Teliris enjoys over others in the space is their ability to scale their backend systems to manage hundreds and thousands of additional customers.
  • Teliris is already seeing the dawn of Inter-Company Business among its customer base and has deployed a solution, SecurePath NNI, that allows disparate companies to connect securely over the Teliris InfiNET network. SecurePath NNI is a two-way authentication process where both sides of an Inter-company meeting must approve the connection before the connection is established which is then torn down immediately after the meeting concludes. Marc believes they are the only provider that has deployed such a solution and envisions a time when other effective visual collaboration providers will want to connect their networks to the Teliris InfiNET network because they have the largest number of companies and rooms "on-net".
  • The #1 concern among the Teliris client base is security. It is imperative that both Intra-company and Inter-company meetings are secure.
  • Teliris offers their customers a set of diagnostic and management tools for their existing videoconferencing rooms that, while doesn't improve the traditional videoconferencing experience, picture quality, or acoustics, does improve the reliability by two-fold.

    HSL's Thoughts on Teliris &Telepresence vs. Executive Aviation

    Telepresence has proven itself in the marketplace for several years now but has remained the best kept secret in telecommunications... until this year. Companies like TeleSuite and Teliris have consistently demonstrated what can only be characterized as revolutionary improvements in the end user acceptance of visual collaboration but for years nobody "got it" (Except DreamWorks, HP, and Cisco and they sat on the news while they went and built their own solutions). There was never much press, every sale was a "missionary sale" which involved educating senior executives on a technology that no one had ever heard of before, that you had to see to believe (or even understand) and that very few companies had actually deployed. No one ever had any budgeted money for the technology so every sale took forever and if they did buy it was to just kick the tires with 2-3 locations.

    What a difference 6 months makes... Now DreamWorks and HP have publicly launched Halo with more press in 6 weeks than TeleSuite AND Teliris combined saw in the past 6 years, Cisco's CEO John Chambers is publicly talking about telepresence in Newsweek and at Interop and to anyone that will listen, and I have even heard a rumor that some smart folks at Sony are working on educating their senior management who just might pay attention this year now that HP and Cisco are in the game.

    Now Marc and Steve are sitting on a $40MM backlog of orders, the largest network of customer rooms on the planet, and, in one of the most fascinating anecdotes that Marc shared off-camera, have actually met a prospective customer that had budgeted money in 2006 for a telepresence solution!

    "In the Land of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King"

    Since I don't believe that comparing telepresence providers with videoconferencing companies is an adequate comparison given the cost and quality differences between the plastic-camera-on-the-TV-set and an effective telepresence group solution I prefer a comparison with the next best alternative for effective, face-to-face global collaboration: Executive Aviation.

    Boeing Business Jet.jpg

    Globally there are probably about a dozen manufacturers of executive aircraft including several Global Fortune 2000 players: Boeing, Gulfstream, Embraer, Bombardier, Dassault, and others. According to Honeywell's annual Business Aviation Outlook the industry should sell in excess of 800+ business jets this year and according to the National Business Aviation Association there are more than 15,000 companies using over 25,000 business aircraft worldwide.

    In comparison, there are essentially 5 providers of telepresence group solutions, only two of which are Fortune 2000 companies (HP and Cisco and Cisco won't be shipping products until Q2 2007). In a world with 500,000 traditional videoconferencing end-points that nobody seems to really like there are less than 120 telepresence group systems on a planet that could easily support 15,000-35,000 + in the coming decade.

    The point?

    Now that HP and Cisco have let the virtual cat out of the telepresence bag, if you are a global 2000 company looking to be a fast follower and get into what is looking to be a multi-billion dollar market for effective group telepresence systems there aren't too many options available to you to play catch up. Cisco has been working on this since at least September 2004 and they won't be shipping systems until next year so starting from scratch doesn't seem like an attractive option. That leaves buying one of the established companies in the industry which makes Teliris (and TeleSuite, Telanetix, and Digital Video Enterprises) the prettiest little one-eyed belles at the ball.

    • Looking for other posts? Check the archive >
    8 October 2008
    WBS Connect's Charter: Telepresence the Must Have, Killer App
    7 October 2008
    Scientist: Holographic television to become reality
    6 October 2008
    ROVIO Rolls Out: First Impressions of WowWee's Surprising Telepresence Robot
    8 October 2008
    HP and TANDBERG Unveil New Managed Service Offering and Expanded Reseller Agreement
    6 October 2008
    BRIEF-Tandberg says talks with private equity group end
    3 October 2008
    Carbon Free Meeting Coalition Launches New Programs Aimed at Expanding Corporate Use of "Green Meeting" Technologies
    Industry Calendar
    Link Exchange

    Trying to understand the players in the emerging world of telepresence? Find them all in one convenient place, The HPL's Link Exchange.
    Powwow Virtual

    Powwow Virtual – The Lab´s Business Model for Publicly Available Telepresence. Powwow Virtual was recently covered in Broadband Properties Magazine and the Washington Business Journal (.pdf).
    Youtube Channel

    See what happens when YouTube and the HPL come together at HSL's YouTube Channel.
    HPL Whitepaper

    HPL publishes Telepresence, Effective Visual Collaboration, and the Future of Global Business at the Speed of Light. Download the paper Here.
    Wainhouse Paper
    Wainhouse Research Whitepaper
    HSL collaborated with Ira Weinstein of Wainhouse Research on a whitepaper covering Emerging Technologies in Teleconferencing and Telepresence. Click here to get the whitepaper.