Destiny Conferencing released a press release announcing rapid growth and increased orders. The complete press release can be found Here. Excerpts below with my emphasis.

DAYTON, Ohio--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 29, 2006--Destiny Conferencing(TM), the leading provider of technology and services for immersive telepresence, reported today that there has been a marked increase in awareness and interest in their telepresence solutions. Destiny's TELESUITE(R) system combines videoconferencing with integrated room environments to provide widely separated participants the experience of being in the same room in virtual face-to-face meetings. "We have had a strong upsurge in interest in telepresence, both from our existing customers and from elsewhere," said Rob Whatley, the Managing Director of Customer Service and Operations at Destiny Conferencing. "A lot of people talk about delivering telepresence, but we actually deliver it today, and we do it using a standards based approach, so that a TELESUITE system can also participate with regular videoconferences" added Destiny Conferencing President Scott Allen. "With the entrance of companies like HP and Cisco into the marketplace, telepresence has been receiving unprecedented attention recently. Because of this, interest has gone through the roof, and within the last 2 weeks, we've received 10 new orders from our existing customers. Clearly, people are thinking about reducing their dependence on travel because of the recent difficulties, but we think that this goes deeper than that. There seems to be a rapidly growing realization of how telepresence improves time management by facilitating communication between widely separated participants," Allen added.

HSL's Thoughts and Analysis

I spent almost an hour on the phone with Destiny President Scott Allen a couple of days ago (just getting Scott on the phone is a remarkable achievement in and of itself). The ten orders received in the last two weeks is only 1/2 the story at Destiny. The factory has been running full tilt for almost two months and the volume of business has filled the attached warehouse to the roof. The company has been forced to contract for off-site storage for construction materials and the number of prospective customers making the trip to Dayton (the City of Peace and Birthplace of Aviation) to meet the Destiny team and get the tour of the Network Operation Center and factory has tripled! One company that was getting the tour on the day that we spoke was a company that I had last run into a couple of months ago walking into a demonstration for a competitive telepresence provider as I was walking out!

One of the most exciting developments that Scott briefed me on was the on-going development relationship with Polycom. While Destiny has been using Polycom video codecs in the TeleSuite telepresence environment for a number of years, these were standard Polycom 8000 codecs that were essentially "bolted on" in the environment. The partnership with Polycom for the Polycom RPX has led to specialized and custom integration specific to the unique requirements of the TeleSuite environment (automatically launching and connecting multiple calls, simplifing the GUI, etc.) Scott also shared a little of the roadmap for the integration of Polycom's upcoming high-definition codec into the TeleSuite environment as well and I look forward to seeing the next generation product with eager anticipation.

In a seperate call with Rob Whatley, Destiny's Managing Director of Customer Service and Operations, Rob shared that the company has been approached by potential customers interested in integrating other high-definition camera and codec platforms into the TeleSuite environment including the high definition camera and codec platform from LifeSize Communications. This ability for Destiny Conferencing to integrate video codec and camera systems from other vendors is a strong differentiator for Destiny and gives them a unique flexibility to the integrate best-of-breed solutions from other vendors now and in the future.

I also spoke with Brian Kinne, President of MedPresence, who reports rapid growth in the company's telepresence solutions for the healthcare industry and surgical education. MedPresence, along with Internet2, is sponsoring the upcoming Immersive Medical Telepresence Workshop at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix next week on September 6th and 7th. I will be attending the Phoenix workshop and look forward to learning what the medical community is thinking about how best to use these new telepresence tools.