TelePresence Defined

I recently spent some time scouring the Internet for the definition of telepresence. I wanted to understand how presence enabled telecommunications (i.e. telepresence) became synonymous with next generation videoconferencing. Many have adopted the perspective that telepresence is a system in which users "telepresent" themselves, but presence is not the same thing as presenting. People tend to think of telepresence as essentially ultra-cool conference room systems with great sound, life size images, direct eye contact and other enhancements. But to define telepresence in this way does not make it the billion dollar opportunity that John Chambers speaks of.

The first definition I came across was from the founders of Digital Video Enterprises, Dr. Steve McNelley and Jeff Machtig. Their definition which can be found Here on page-5 under "Defining True Telepresence", essentially lists five components. The problem with their definition is that it's really just a list of product features that make their room conferencing systems better than the stuff it replaced. Their list of features includes true eye contact, life-size images, proper rendering of participants, broadcast quality images, and "superb" audio quality.

The next description of telepresence I came across was from none other than John Chambers as noted in this NetworkWorld article by Stephen Lawson, published on March 16, 2006. Stephen writes, "The telepresence system [referring to Cisco's yet to be released telepresence conferencing system] will use "lifesize" high-definition video and directional sound technology that makes voices seem to come from where a user is located at the remote site", Chambers said. "It will even include better lighting than current systems", said Donald Proctor, senior vice president of Cisco's Voice Technology Group." This description of telepresence seems in-line with the gentlemen from Digital Video Enterprises, but will not be a billion dollar business for Cisco as Chambers has said, if that's the core of Cisco's telepresence initiative.

After reading Chamber's comments, I wondered what our friends in Redmond had to say with regards to telepresence, so I headed back to Google for another look-see. A search for the word telepresence on www.microsoft.com only returns references to Microsoft's research, but nothing related to shipping products that they've chosen to package or brand as being part of a telepresence solution. By the way, the same search at www.cisco.com turns up even less, a meager nine references, none of which are worth reading.

Gordon Bell from Microsoft's Media Presence Research Group (previously known as the telepresence group) states in the notes section of slide-3 of a presentation found Here that, "I think of ... telepresence as having various dimensions. The three dimensions are: (1) the mechanism - how is telepresence accomplished; (2) the application - what is achieved using telepresence; and, (3) the group structure - who is using telepresence." If you take the time to read more of their research material, and review product information, what you'll find is that telepresence at Microsoft equals Office Communications Server 2007 plus a video camera called RoundTable, and is part of their unified communications family of products.

Next stop on my journey to find the true definition of telepresence took me all over the googlesphere and back. What I found was lots of messaging around "unified communications" by Cisco, Microsoft, and others, but not much else from the uber-vendors regarding telepresence per se. Donald Proctor, senior vice president of Cisco's Voice Technology Group, is quoted as saying the following in the previously mentioned NetworkWorld article,

"Videoconferencing has had a rocky history over many years, with expectations of a boom frequently dashed. Previous systems have failed because of complexity, high cost and generally poor quality. Cisco will solve the complexity problem by making the telepresence system just one component of its overall Unified Communications architecture, which also includes IP telephony, text messaging, application collaboration and desktop videoconferencing. Enterprises will be able to plug it into that infrastructure, he said. Telepresence initially is designed not for desktop use but for corporate boardrooms or dedicated videoconference rooms."

In another good article by Stephen Law, this one dated May 5, 2006 titled "Cisco's Chambers pushes collaboration, video", it became apparent to me that vendors are using too many overloaded terms with nebulous meanings and connotations. Chambers was quoted in the article as saying, "Collaboration is the key to enterprises both moving quickly and dealing with the demands of globalization, 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." Chambers also said, "Collaboration isn't about data or video or voice or mobility, it's about how you combine that experience." The article's author goes on to say, "Cisco's push on collaboration is part of a vision of all applications becoming accessible on all devices at all times, through virtualization of storage, applications and processing."

My next stop was a visit to Microsoft's Unified Communications website where I found the following:

"Microsoft's vision for unified communications enables a people-centric solution of rich, intuitive, and seamless communications across e-mail, IM, voice, data, video, and conferencing. Microsoft offers companies a complete software platform that unifies all communications with their business applications and processes, streamlining how people reach each other and communicate."

Cisco's corresponding Unified Communications website had this to say:

"The Cisco Unified Communications system is a full-featured business communications system built into an intelligent IP network. The system contains a number of communications products that are designed, developed, tested, documented, sold, and supported as one entity. It enables voice, data, and video communications for businesses of all sizes."

Notice the difference in the messaging? Microsoft's approach is people and application centric while Cisco's is "system" and infrastructure centric. No surprises here you say? It seems to me that the message of unified communications is about people using applications to get stuff done in a seamless and integrated fashion - 2 points for Redmond.

The terms collaboration, convergence, unified communications, and telepresence have significant overlap based on how they are currently used by vendors, and it's only going to get worse unless we adopt clear definitions and usage.

I would like to suggest that the following be adopted as the formal definition of telepresence:

Telepresence: The transmission of voice, data, and video for the purpose of collaboration, formatted and optimized according to the information provided by each user indicating their feasibility, availability, and willingness to participate in all aspects of communications.

The word telepresence is the combination of the meanings of the following two words, telecommunications and presence. The word telecommunications is made up of the Greek word "tele" which means far off, and communications which is the exchange of thoughts, messages, or information in any form (i.e. verbal, non-verbal, visual, etc.). Presence [information] conveys availability and willingness of a user to communicate.

So by way of formula: Telepresence = Telecommunications + Presence

So how does unified communications and collaboration fit into all this? Collaboration is what happens between participants within good telepresence applications, and is made possible by a unified communications infrastructure. Telepresence is the killer-app that the carriers have been longing for. By combining broadband, presence information, standards based protocols like SIP, new advancements in shared workspaces and other collaborative tools, security and digital rights management, virtualized compute fabrics, and other elements all cohesively delivered together is what makes telepresence the billion dollar business John Chambers is talking about.

Telepresence is not tele-presenting or next generation video conferencing. It's the single most important game-changing synthesis of technology and innovation yet to hit the enterprise. Getting telepresence wrong will become the CLM (career limiting move) for CIOs who fail to understand the power of telepresence. Investing in disparate silos of collaboration tools, VoIP implementations, next-generation video conferencing, IM products, and other "unified communications" stuff, without a plan to fully integrate it all in such a way as to enable anytime, anywhere, ubiquitous collaborative communications will not deliver on the promise of telepresence.

Yes indeed the board room telepresence experience will include true eye-to-eye contact, superb audio and lighting, plus life-size images too. But if it's not fully integrated into the telepresence fabric so that anyone, anywhere, via any capable device can participate to the fullest extent possible in the collaborative process, then it's simply point-to-multipoint next generation videoconferencing.

You'll know when you're experiencing the promise of telepresence when the application fabric that ties users, information, tools, and the nodes (wireless handhelds, smart phones, PCs, room systems, etc.) together in such a way that everyone has a fully interactive and optimized experience no matter where they are. If your node can handle video/data/audio (and you want it) you'll get it - and it will be just like being there. Everything will be captured, indexed, searchable, and retrievable for later use, and things like rights management, security, true collaboration, and messaging will all be transparent parts of the package too.

About the author: Brent Houlahan, CISSP is a member of the Human Productivity Lab's Board of Advisors, a writer and independent consultant who most recently served as the CTO and VP of Operations at NetSec, an MSP acquired by MCI in February of 2005 and as Vice President of Managed Security Services at MCI. E-mail Brent at: Brent.Houlahan [at] HumanProductivityLab [dot] com

HSL's Thoughts and Analysis

As usual Brent is dead-on especially with respect to the importance of the tight integration of Presence and Unified Communications into a broader definition of telepresence.

While the focus of the Lab has been on Telepresence Conferencing which I defined in Telepresence, Effective Visual Collaboration, and the Future of Global Business at the Speed of Light as:

the significant impact that unified communications and presence are having on human productivity has led us to expand the Lab's focus to better cover these emerging technologies.

I first realized the importance of the coming wave of unified communications and presence after watching the one hour, fifty two minute and four second video of the Microsoft Unified Communications announcement where Microsoft President Jeff Raikes and Anoop Gupta, who runs the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft announced the Microsoft strategy, told the traditional telephony/PBX and VoIP industries how it was going to be and christened the survivors that would be left standing as members of their "partner ecosystem".

My second "A-Ha Moment" was actually three "A-Ha Moments" experienced in rapid fire succession at the 2006 Wainhouse Research Summit in Boston where presentations on Unified Communications by Wainhouse Research's Brent Kelly, Cisco Systems' Mike Fratesi, and Microsoft's Ed Wadbrook, [available for streaming download Here], drove home the incredible potential of unified communications and presence to dramatically improve human productivity.

The capabilities that most excite me about Unified Communications and Presence are:

* The ability to manage all communications from a single in-box - At the Wainhouse Summit, Microsoft's Ed Wadbrook highlighted the absurdity of today's disjointed communications platforms by listing his nine (9) different phone numbers, fax numbers, IM handles, e-mail accounts, and skype address. Cisco's Mike Fratesi shared research conducted by Sage Research for Cisco on the time savings of managing all e-mails, voicemails, and faxes from a single inbox: Estimated at 43 minutes per day per employee.

* The ability to reliably reach coworkers on the first try - By combining presence with a unified communications platform the Sage Research study estimated saving of 30 minutes per employee per day by the ability to intelligently route calls directly to a colleague's desk, mobile phone, hotel room, or home office on the first attempt.

* The ability to automatically escalate IM chat sessions into a call, webconference, or videoconference - This is the capability that I most excited about. A good portion of human beings are "visual learners" (including myself) and the ability to instantly and effectively share information with colleagues, vendors, customers, or prospects without having to launch a new webconferencing/videoconferencing application, exchange invitation information, and authenticate in would dramatically streamline and improve visual collaboration. The Sage Research study estimates savings of 51 minutes per day by automatically escalating IM chats into collaborative web conferences and 30 minutes per meetings by simplifing the set up and attendance of webconferences through Outlook/Notes calendar integration.

The study also found that 93% of users would conduct more web and videoconferences if it was easier. Since research has shown that seeing and hearing information improves both retention and comprehension vs. simply hearing it, the potential to improve organizational learning is substantial.

Summarized Benefits from Unified Communications Application: Uses and Benefits - Sage Research January 2006

I was so blown away by the potential of unified communications and presence that I immediately huddled several members of the HPL's Board of Advisors including Brent and Chris Van Waters, CIO at enterprise medical software company QuadraMed, and we made the decison that this was definitely an area that will have a substantial impact on human productivity and the lab should expand its focus to include the coming unified communications revolution.

Since then I have been getting smart on the unifed communications and presence industry, the Lab has expanded our CXO level conference series, TelePresence World 2007, to include presence and unified communications and expect a major announcement from the Lab later this week on an important partnership that will give us additional depth and expertise on the subject. We will also soon be announcing the Lab's next major publication, due out in April 2007 prior to the first TelePresence World conference in San Diego on June 4th, 5th, and 6th which will cover telepresence conferencing, presence, and unified communications. We will also be redesigning the Lab's website to give unified communications and presence the emphasis that they so richly deserve.