Cisco's CEO John Chambers predicted that telepresence will be a multi-billion product line for Cisco in his opening keynote at the Networkers 2006 conference in Las Vegas. The substance of the speech was covered by both Chris Kraeuter at Forbes and Tom Sanders at vnunet.com and I am including a link to a video interview with John Chambers discussing telepresence as well. Here is a link to each article, some excerpts with my usual emphasis, and my thoughts and analysis.

Cisco Reaches Out by Chris Kraeuter, Forbes - June 20th, 2006

Las Vegas -Cisco Systems aims to create a "telepresence" [system] it says can generate $1 billion in annual sales within the next seven years.

Chief Executive John Chambers outlined the new initiative on Tuesday during a presentation in front of 10,000 customers and partners at Cisco Networkers, an annual conference held this year at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Telepresence involves conferencing and communicating via video and voice--a business that many other players have been working at for years. Chambers said Cisco's take on the industry would be formally introduced later this year, and that collaboration technologies, in general, will represent a major wave of productivity improvements during the coming years...

..."The network is moving away from transport and toward enabling interactions," Chambers said.

Cisco Sets Sail for Teleconferencing- Networking Giant Sees Multi-billion Dollar Telepresence Market
by Tom Sanders at Networkers in Las Vegas, vnunet.com 21 Jun 2006

Cisco Systems is likely to unveil 'tele-presence' as its latest 'advanced technology', chief executive John Chambers said in his opening keynote at the Networkers 2006 conference in Las Vegas.

An 'advanced technology' in Cisco's dictionary has the potential to generate $1bn in annual sales and will see a focus of the company's investments in research, acquisitions and partnerships...

...Current-generation video conferencing products have failed because they lack quality and interactivity, argued Brian Riggs, principal analyst for enterprise telephony at Current Analysis.

"You are basically looking at the other person's forehead. There isn't a lot of value in that," Riggs told vnunet.com.

Click the Image above or Here to watch the Interview

Here is another important article on telepresence from Luc Hatlestad at VAR Business (any articles that quote me and refer to the Human Productivity Lab automatically gain the status: Important on the Lab's website ;-) This one came out about a month ago but somehow slipped past my Google and Yahoo news filters and was only brought to my attention by an HPL reader wondering why I hadn't posted it to the site yet.

Virtually There: The Telepresence Revolution Takes Shape
By Luc Hatlestad, VARBusiness May 11, 2006

...Hewlett-Packard's Halo project is arguably the most advanced video collaboration offering on the market, but competitors large and small will soon be nipping at HP's heels. In March, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers told attendees at the company's partner summit that "telepresence" will be a key application in the coming year. "It's the ability to have unified communications set up with a couple of clicks," he said. "It's not just videoconferencing, but real collaboration."

Other smaller vendors such as TeleSuite also are pushing competing solutions, but the reseller community's eyes will likely be on Cisco as the market takes shape. HP currently sells Halo only through its commercial sales force and plans to make it available to VARs only when it's time to reach out to the midmarket.

Although Cisco won't comment on its telepresence plans, it's safe to assume that solution providers will play a key role in selling and deploying the technology once it's ready. "Cisco is behind HP, but not that far behind," says Howard Lichtman, founder of the Human Productivity Lab (HPL), a consultancy studying the emerging telepresence market. "Cisco has the channel as a motivated sales force to sell this in a way I don't think HP will."

While Luc Hatlestad at Var Business did nail my thoughts on the Cisco channel being a strong and motivated partner to assist in taking the company's eventual telepresence offering to the market, I think he might have misinterpreted my thoughts as to how far Cisco is or isn't behind HP and others in this space. As I have mentioned in previous articles on this site, I have known that Cisco has had a Telepresence Business Unit since September 2004 and while I know through industry rumors and scuttlebutt some generalities of the upcoming offering, I have been a tad disappointed that it is taking the company as long as it is to roll out version one.

As I have pointed out in other articles on this site Cisco's competitors are off-to-the-races and Cisco is talking about getting to the gate in Q2 of 2007. HP already has 60+ HP Halo Studios operational or on-order including, importantly, a global network of 24 of their own studios that are critical as demonstration facilities for prospective customers (and they are even kicking around more than doubling that number internally). Teliris has over 110 GlobalTable sites operational or on-order and is about to officially announce their 4th generation system, and even Polycom who only seemed to "get it" once their customers started asking them: "What are you going to be doing in the Halo Space?" after the HP announcement in December of 2005 has already launched the RPX, a Polycom specified version of Destiny Conferencing's TeleSuite System which gave them a proven solution, demonstration capabilities, and connectivity to the third largest effective visual collaboraition network in the world right out of the gate.

So I really don't know how far Cisco is behind the pack because, even though the company remains one of the top three domains that regularly visits this site and whose employees have generated over a thousand hits in a single day before, they have remained remarkably tight-lipped about the upcoming offering. Hey.. John, Randy and Phil... We are the #1 site on the Internet covering the emerging telepresence industry... Where is the love?