First, from the always insightful Wainhouse Research Bulletin - Volume 8 Issue #8 16-Mar-07 (.pdf link):

Cisco Ups Ante in Telepresence Game Against the backdrop of the CeBIT 2007 extravaganza in Hannover, Germany, Cisco unveiled multiple Telepresence product announcements as well as some partnership and customer wins. Six months into the Telepresence market, the company has begun to make some very serious inroads. The product and partnership announcements in brief:

Multipoint capabilities

We covered this in last week's WRB since we saw a demo of the company's 36-port switch ($99K) at VoiceCon in Orlando. This was officially announced at CeBIT. Consider this a software MCU. Depending on user preferences, meeting participants who speak are displayed either by entire location or by individual screens. In the background, the company is also developing a hardware MCU to be delivered later this year based on Radvision's SCOPIA platform (see next paragraph). Figure MSRP $78K for 12 ports and $213K for 36 ports. SCOPIA will need to support 1080p among other things.

H.323 interoperabiliy:

Conceding to the market that the ability to connect to an ordinary endpoint is important, even if such a connection does break the telepresence "illusion" that the remote people are in the same room, Cisco announced the coming capability to make such calls. Details on how the user interface will work were not revealed, but the technology behind the scenes is surely to be Radvision's SCOPIA platform and its ability to transcode between Cisco's HD world and the ordinary world of HD and SD videoconferencing. Cisco Auto Collaborate: This capability was actually announced in October of last year, but is now being delivered and demo'd. Meeting participants can easily share files, physical documents and objects over telepresence using collaboration tools such as a high-definition document camera or simply by plugging in a laptop computer. Images from the most recently activated device are sent to all rooms in the meeting automatically.

Cisco Telepresent Virtual Agent:

This is a solution that integrates the single-screen Cisco TelePresence 1000 with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express. Experts could interact with customers across multiple remote branch locations on demand, without the need to travel.

The company is entering field trials with three network service providers (Verizon, AT&T, and NTT) with the intention of providing secure business-to-business communications. The goal is to expand the TelePresence environment beyond the corporate firewall to establish inter-company meetings via the Cisco Secure Business to Business TelePresence technology. Other network providers working with Cisco's telepresence systems include BT and Deutsche Telekom.

Cisco TelePresence Select Operate Service provides customers and partners with remote monitoring and management of their network, Unified Communications and TelePresence solutions. An optional service add-on is the TelePresence Remote Assistance Service, which provides real-time administrative support.

The Cisco press release includes quotes from Lehman Brothers (must be a customer!) and T-Systems, a Cisco authorized technology partner and a division of Deutsche Telekom. Cisco also announced at CeBIT a collaboration with Regus Plc to provide the first public TelePresence service offering that will enable Regus' customers to book a virtual meeting at any of 50 select locations globally. The new service will allow multiple physical rooms to be linked simultaneously, either using other Regus TelePresence locations or linking to external TelePresence facilities at third party locations. The service will be made available both to existing Regus tenants as well as to the general public and can be utilized either by-the-hour or on an extended service basis.

Regus expects to deliver the first services within 120 days and will deploy more than fifty percent of locations within North America with the remaining sites located worldwide within 12 months. The new service will take advantage of the Cisco Secure Business-to-Business (B2B) technology announced at CeBIT to support connecting Regus TelePresence locations with endpoints located outside the Regus corporate network. The new Cisco TelePresence Multipoint switch solution will underpin the ability to link up to 36 geographically distant sites together in one single virtual meeting. Regus is the world's largest provider of fully furnished and equipped offices, with 950 locations in 70 countries, so these first 50 systems could be just a drop in the bucket!

In related news, BT announced it is supplying the Media-Saturn group, Europe's biggest retailer of consumer electronics, with its new video collaboration service BT Unified Communications Video (based on Cisco Telepresence solutions). The Media-Saturn group, which operates in 14 European countries, will initially use the system at its headquarters in Ingolstadt, Germany, and at its Munich, Paris and Moscow branches. BT will operate the solution and provide the necessary capacity and performance assurance on its intelligent MPLS network, so that images and sound can be transmitted with no perceived time lag. Expansion of the system is already planned, so that eventually all 14 countries will be covered.

Wainhouse Research Comments:

Well, we dinged Cisco hard months ago for having a product without multipoint support, no embedded data collaboration functionality, and for scoring zero on interoperability. The company has clearly moved fast to resolve the first two points and to announce an intended solution to the third. Color us impressed. We also have to admit that Cisco appears to be gathering significant traction in the videoconferencing space by taking advantage of the company's reputation, their reach into high level executive ears, their Telepresence solution's impressive demo qualities, their ability to talk about network solutions, and when push comes to shove, their ability to discount on telepresence and make it up on router/switch upgrade sales.

New HPL Video Content on TelePresence @ Cisco

The HPL Video Interview: An Overview of the Cisco CTS 3000 TelePresence System - A video overview of the Cisco CTS 3000 TelePresence System with Phil Marechal, Product Line Manager & Jennifer Baker, Senior Marketing Manager at the Cisco TelePresence Business Unit with Howard S. Lichtman, President - Human Productivity Lab.

The HPL Video Interview: TelePresence @ Cisco: An Update - Howard S. Lichtman of Human Productivity Lab interviews Randy Harrell, Director of Product Marketing @ Cisco's TelePresence Business Unit on the success of the launch of Cisco TelePresence, how Cisco is using TelePresence internally with over 110+ locations on the way and how John Chambers met virtually with hundreds of reporters, analysts, employees, customers, prospective customers, dignitaries, and HSL in New York, London, Hong Kong and San Jose on October 23 2006.

Other Important HPL News:

Networking Telepresence 2007 - The Lab will soon be announcing an industry report covering the options that enterprise telepresence customers have in networking telepresence systems internally and with their external business partners, vendors, and customers. Please drop Chris Payatagool at Human Productivity Lab an e-mail to reserve a copy upon release:
info (at) humanproductivitylab (dot) com

Telepresence Options 2008 - The Lab will soon be announcing it's next major paper covering telepresence, telepresence technology, telepresence content, and internetworking telepresence. The paper will take up where Telepresence, Effective Visual Collaboration and the Future of Global Business at the Speed of Light left off. We will be covering the growth of the industry over the last year, the new entrants, the new offerings, and what is coming out of the Labs. There will be a DVD this time with more video content from the HPL: Get the thoughts of the key executives driving the industry and a look at the latest telepresence technology and internetworking solutions. Please drop Chris Payatagool at Human Productivity Lab an e-mail to reserve a copy upon release: info (at) humanproductivitylab (dot) com

New Video Content Channels

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