In the current edition of CXO Magazine, Howard S. Lichtman, President of the Human Productivity Lab hosted an executive roundtable interview with David Hsieh – Director of Marketing for Telepresence and Emerging Technologies at Cisco, Ray Siuta – Marketing Manager for HP Halo Collaboration Solutions, Marc Trachtenberg – CEO of Teliris and Steve McNelley – Co-founder of DVE Telepresence. The interview features each executive's views of telepresence and where their respective products fit into the world of effective visual collaboration.

CXO RoundTable - Capitalizing on the Power of Telepresence

To shed some light on the benefits that multinationals can achieve from telepresence, Howard Lichtman, President of the Human Productivity Lab, sat down with four experts in this field for an in-depth discussion.

CXO. Would you please describe your strategy to deliver the widest potential network of businesses that can be reached via your telepresence offering?

DH. Cisco is focused on three dimensions of extending presence: you, your team and your business. We look at enabling a broad range of applications, not just meetings. For example, we recently announced our Cisco TelePresence Virtual Agent product, which enables telepresence in a contact center. This is a great way for companies to leverage scarce expertise - for example a bank might make specialized experts available to every branch via telepresence for personalized consultation and service. That's not possible now. We also look at how businesses can use telepresence to collaborate with customers, partners, suppliers etc. That requires sophisticated networking capability that is a core Cisco strength. Our B2B technology has over 12 patents pending and will be the industry's first secure inter-company telepresence technology that leverages existing corporate and service provider networks.

Finally, we believe that quality and simplicity are critical. For telepresence to be effective, the experience has to be 'as good as being there'. Anything less jeopardizes critical relationships. That's why we lead the industry in video/audio quality with the only ultra-high definition video (1080p) solution available today. Simplicity is really about enabling self-service for all users to lower total cost of ownership. If your telepresence deployment requires a high support commitment from IT and/or your vendor, you won't be able to scale across your business.

RS. By offering HP Halo and the Halo Video Exchange Network (HVEN) as a fully managed service, our customers avoid the burden of developing, expanding and otherwise managing their networks with the demands of telepresence. Telepresence solutions with their high bandwidth requirements can place extraordinary demands on corporate networks. With Halo and the HVEN, HP assumes all responsibilities for development and operation of the HVEN. In turn, HP serves as a single point of accountability for maintaining extremely high quality of service on the HVEN worldwide.

HVEN is unique in telepresence solutions because it is dedicated to HP Halo studios and therefore ensures a seamless, real-time, no perceived delay experience every time it is used between any Halo points worldwide. The HVEN is designed to enable any Halo location to connect seamlessly and easily to any other one, two or three Halo locations. In a way, the HVEN is the video network of the 21st century and allows current and future Halo solutions to connect anywhere they are located worldwide. Halo users then have access to their own global constituents (customers, suppliers, partners, etc.) as well as the growing universe of companies that are already members of the HVEN. HP's end-to-end support and HVEN eliminate stress to our client's already burdened network infrastructure, and they won't incur additional expense or personnel to maintain the studios.

Over time, the HVEN will be extended to other video conferencing systems, starting first with the Tandberg video systems and then to other standards-based video conferencing systems. The Tandberg video solutions will extend the reach of Halo to tens of thousands of new locations. Other standards-based video will further extend Halo's reach over time.

MT. Leveraging our broad installed base of 2000 global clients and significant and diverse industry coverage, Teliris is leading the way delivering deep telepresence reach. With VirtuaLive as the most widely deployed and most flexible, most robust platform for truly immersive telepresence communications and its capabilities, such as Secure Path NNI (our secure inter-client interconnect protocol) we offer the most capable means to continue our growing interconnected client base. With Dynamic Scenario Manager (our patent pending algorithmic provisioning engine) we have taken the next step and have established the only method of interconnecting dissimilar telepresence solutions.
Teliris' sole focus on producing the most natural and deployable telepresence solutions, delivered through rich and thoughtful managed service. This gives it the clear edge in innovation, driving more and more users to its telepresence network of businesses.

SM. DVE is committed to permit the widest range of legacy videoconferencing systems to access our telepresence experiences. We also design all of our telepresence solutions around a "client centric" system architecture for the greatest degree of flexibility to meet needs. For example, if a large corporate firm has already deployed hundreds of LifeSize, Polycom, Tandberg or Sony conferencing rooms then we can choose codecs and cameras to integrate with our true eye-contact telepresence displays that match their deployed conferencing infrastructure.

CXO. What kind of content (training, product certification, entertainment, etc.) can we expect to see from your telepresence platform in the coming years?

DH. We believe telepresence is a transformative technology that will ultimately affect all four quadrants of your life - work, live, learn and play. We're focused on the 'work' quandrant right now, fleshing out additional capabilities that will enable a variety of collaborative scenarios but we have a very broad vision and a very aggressive timeline to fulfil that vision.

We're already seeing customers use telepresence across every functional area of the business: sales, marketing, supply chain, finance etc. And new capabilities like the Cisco Auto-Collaborate capability which lets users use collaboration tools like PC video projection and a high resolution document camera across rooms without user intervention or training are enabling new applications that we never anticipated.

Cisco has one of the largest telepresence deployments in the world for our own use. Over the holidays we opened up our telepresence rooms to employees to meet with their families across the world. It was a great success. In fact, we had engineers celebrating with their families in India and families opening Christmas presents over telepresence. It's an early example of how telepresence will impact the 'live' quadrant of our lives.

RS. HP Halo is aligned with Tandberg to unite HVEN with Tandberg's portfolio of videoconferencing systems to offer customers a complete suite of collaboration solutions that deliver unmatched quality, reliability and simplicity for visual communications across the enterprise. By offering Tandberg's systems on the HVEN, the network becomes the de facto platform on which standards-based video conferencing solutions can operate. Full video system inter-operability - long desired by businesses worldwide - will be enabled by the HVEN. The high quality, natural, personal connection experience arising from Halo and the HVEN enables a wide variety of business applications and vertical applications. Besides the well-known Halo uses for business effectiveness such as decision-making, project team meetings, & global organization integration and business continuity, third party providers of telemedicine, distance learning, and government solutions can be expected to apply Halo and the HVEN to their services.

MT. Teliris' goal is to provide the most realistic synthetic environment for people to meet and collaborate, using the means and tools they need in ways they feel best fit. We currently offer a broad array of content support including CD, DVD, BlueRay, video editing, music composition, traditional video conferencing, desktop conferencing, web conferencing and others. Today, Teliris leads in the telepresence market, by offering the broadest range of diverse content delivery and we will extend that lead as content requirements become requirements for the meetings we support.

SM. DVE believes the advent of HDTV conferencing opens up whole new design possibilities for conference rooms. We have avoided the multiple plasma panel rooms that use multiple codecs and common plasma panels because of their lack of true immersion. These systems, though impressive at first sight, are overly complicated, too expensive to have wide scale deployment, have thick plasma bezels between the images, and rack up huge bandwidth bills per month. Shortly, true telepresence will leap into a new realm of tele-immersion. Cinema aspect ratio displays that show people sitting and standing will become the standard for quality interaction. Even further, augmented reality conferencing will soon be released that projects peoples images in the physical space of the meeting room. DVE has several patented technologies for this next generation tele-immersion experience which will be marketed under the name DVE Mirage.

CXO. What is your strategy for making your systems publicly available on a per use or per hour basis and what do you see the price point for such a service?

DH. Telepresence value grows exponentially with the number of end points; this is often called Metcalf's Law. So, public telepresence availability makes a great deal of sense. We think there will end up being multiple providers offering public and semi-public telepresence and there will be some market experimentation on the business model and market pricing. We already see telepresence having a much higher utilization that traditional video conferencing so that's a positive sign.

We believe two factors will drive public telepresence success: simplicity and secure global connectivity. On the simplicity side, users need to be able to walk off the street. literally, and initiate a telepresence session - it has to be as easy as dialing a phone number. Secure, global connectivity will also be important because telepresence may be from/to a public telepresence system to a business-owned system. Businesses will want to insure that telepresence leverages the same security infrastructure that they use for other network traffic.

RS. HP is committed to offering telepresence solution access to the public and is in active conversations with key partners to help make that vision a reality. HP is now working with a broad set of potential third parties that would offer Halo Studios on a pay per use basis. Potential placements for HP Halo solutions could include commercial office buildings, research parks, office parks, conference centers and hotels. Importantly, the global reach of the HVEN enables the pay per use model, on an hourly or daily basis, to work for a range of businesses, government organizations and individual users.

MT. Most of Teliris' current clients like to keep their telepresence capabilities close at hand. In fact several of our clients have moved rooms to floor more convenient for executive access. We do realize that there are many individuals interested in having access to publicly accessible telepresence rooms and Teliris will leverage our partner relationship to support any such model. We do not anticipate driving to a public access model directly. The price point for this service will be driven by those providing it directly to the participants.

SM. Public conferencing has been tried for many years. The data base for common VTC rooms for rent is now in the thousands. On the other end of the spectrum has been the install of expensive conference rooms with large rear projection screens in hotels over the past decade. I cannot comment on whether these ventures have been successful. I do have a concern with bandwidth costs of 6-15 Megs per month required for many of these new telepresence systems to operate from the various vendors. It will all boil down to simple economics. Cost per square foot in retail spaces and hotels is a huge issue and the monthly overhead for bandwidth to the premises is a challenging proposition of which the ROI needs to be demonstrated.

CXO. How can CEO's get ROI from investments in telepresence as opposed to the amount of money previously spent on videoconferencing?

DH. I'd look at ROI from three different perspectives: traditional cost justification, business transformation and carbon footprint reduction.

Telepresence benefits from the same traditional cost justifications that apply to any collaborative technology - travel cost reduction and improved employee productivity. In the case of telepresence there are early signs that utilization is much higher than video conferencing so the ROI is both faster and higher. Low utilization is what has made the ROI on traditional video conferencing so disappointing.

The real business benefit of telepresence is centered around business transformation - literally having a presence where you couldn't before. That's because telepresence is the first video technology that is good enough to be customer facing without compromise. This opens up a range of new business strategies and models for sales, supply chain, customer service and more that impact revenue generation. The ROI from improving competitiveness and gaining strategic advantage can be multiple orders of magnitude higher than purely focusing on cost reduction benefits.

Telepresence can also play a key part of your company's efforts to reduce carbon emissions. While it's not strictly related to ROI, carbon footprint emission is becoming a corporate priority for many companies around the globe and supports business initiatives to 'Go Green'.

RS. Companies who have already purchased the HP Halo solution are now recognizing solid returns on investment within the first 12 months of use. Already more than 85 percent of existing Halo customers have purchased additional Halo Studios. These companies have built competitive advantages, accelerated decision-making, improved product time-to-market and enhanced business effectiveness. At the same time, they save travel time & expense.

Halo allows executives to be in more places in one day, to be engaged in more team discussions, to be closer to regional issues and otherwise, to stay closer to their globally dispersed organizations. No other telepresence solution comes close to providing the benefits of Halo and the fully managed Halo Video Exchange Network. Another measure of Halo's effectiveness: the Halo Studios in HP and at our customers' locations are in great demand. The operating hours per week are many times higher than that for standards-based video conferencing systems.

Most importantly, the HVEN enables these benefits to accrue to the customer without the need for increased customer IT resources. And since Halo must work all the time, the Halo Operations Centers takes actions that ensure the very highest level of service.

MT. Most people will agree that traditional video conferencing has not delivered on the promises to stop people from traveling for critical meetings therefore undermining any ROI ever hoped for. With the immersive nature of telepresence combined with a guaranteed service level and reliability, individuals are now able to use telepresence to truly reduce travel costs and significantly increase personal productivity. Beyond that Teliris VirtuaLive™ clients are driving ROI from many other areas as well.

SM. Some companies got into the swing of using traditional conferencing and others let their units gather dust. Granted, the human factors and experience of set-top conferencing was frustrating which is what has given birth to the field of telepresence. What traditional conferencing had going for it was a room install price from $25,000 to $60,000. The bandwidth to the rooms was not an expensive obstacle at 384 kb so corporations bought tens of thousands of them with a 32" CRT and put them in lots of rooms. Telepresence is a whole other story. The costs for the systems are exponentially greater to deploy and operate on a monthly basis. For the C-level executives these rooms may make since but it is a huge cost challenge to bring that experience of multiple plasma panels into hundreds of sites in a corporation. Just recently we heard from a major corporation that has deployed 7 such systems at various corporate campuses and they now confess they cannot justify spending anymore. They are looking for something less expensive, more compact, and can work in more locations.

CXO. How does your particular telepresence solution differ from that offered by similar vendors in the market?

DH. Cisco's solution is differentiated on three key attributes: quality, simplicity and architecture.

Quality means an experience that is every bit 'as good as being there' - anything less potentially compromises valuable relationships and defeats the business transformation potential of telepresence. Cisco's TelePresence solution incorporates 100% life size images, while we implemented multi-channel spatial audio and patented techniques for minimizing latency on the network so that telepresence happens with no perceivable latency anywhere around the world. That way you look and sound exactly like you do in person.

The importance of simplicity cannot be underestimated. In order for telepresence to scale efficiently across an organization, users, regardless of whether their usage is frequent, casual or infrequent, need to have an intuitive experience that does not require training, menus or manuals. This 'self-service' model is the only cost-effective way to deploy telepresence broadly across an organization.

Architecture means leveraging existing services, standards and capabilities - sometimes in unpredictable ways - to gain new capabilities faster and cheaper. Using the Network as the Platform enables businesses to leverage their existing network infrastructure, security infrastructure and other network services. This ultimately leads to lower operational costs, faster innovation cycles and leveraged use of shared resources like bandwidth.

RS. That sets the HP Halo Collaboration Studios apart from other solutions on the market is the HVEN network. The HVEN is the only globally inter-connected collaboration network managed from end-to-end.

Now in its third generation upgrade, the HVEN allows customers instant access to a dedicated network of Halo Studio that puts no additional load on their internal networks, no perceived delay in audio or video, no need to hire or train additional in-house IT resources and 24x7 service and support managed entirely by HP. The quality of the user experience is unmatched by any other offering available today. HP Halo technology will never be obsolete as the upgrades come included with the monthly service fee. While competitive offerings might have a lower entry price point, the long-term resource investment -- both financial and personnel -- to ensure consistent quality, readiness and the inclusion of new features far exceeds the complete offering provided by HP Halo.

MT. Teliris' sole focus is to maintain our position as the premiere Managed Service Provider that delivers a turnkey, fully-managed solution that synthetically replicates the human dynamics of live meetings. Teliris has created a technology solution that provides the most immersive telepresence experience possible. Indeed, flexibility is key. The Teliris VirtuaLive™ solution allows for organizations to create telepresence rooms with five or more displays in each room, allowing six sites in a multi-point call without compromise.

Teliris also provides an unmatched 24x7 VNOC service and is the only telepresence service provider with a published 99 percent plus guaranteed end-to-end SLA. That includes all components of the solution, not just the network or 'intelligent components'. Our commitment is to successful meetings for our clients. The telepresence lifecycle is also unique from any other telepresence vendor; we fully engage with our clients to understand how they meet and the culture they work in to ensure the telepresence rooms enhance their business interactions not drive how they conduct their business. As well as this Teliris is committed to ensuring that our telepresence solutions are priced to be cost justified and commercially viable for our clients' business.SM. Our large rooms offer immersive experiences the other vendors cannot provide using multiple plasma panels in a row. DVE also has small meeting room systems that provide a camera hidden behind the eyes of the person on the screen for perfect eye contact. DVE also offers the only true telepresence personal system (Executive Telepresence System) that provides a life size image of a person in an office with perfect eye contact in HD. Generally our systems are considerably less expensive than our competition and our systems have far superior human factor design. DVE is also flexible so that the client can choose the codec that best fits their infrastructure.

CXO. How would you define true telepresence?

DH. There's a long answer and a short answer to that question. The long answer involves discussing Cisco's 15 Rules of TelePresence - which describe the telepresence experience and it's what we use to guide product design. The shorter answer is that true telepresence uses 'real life' as its paradigm. You look and sound exactly like you do in real life. You appear as the same size as you do in real life. The technology to accomplish this is as transparent as possible to the users.

By comparison, traditional video conferencing uses television as its paradigm. There's a remote control and a pan/tilt/zoom camera - the technology is front and center, not the user experience. Even 'high def' video conferencing uses this paradigm. The video resolution is better but low latency, life size images and transparency of the technology are all still missing.

RS. To HP, telepresence is an experience, not a physical place. It is an experience represented by real-time, natural, personal connections with no distractions arising from tedious set-up processes, quality issues, reliability problems, & complex operating controls. Effective telepresence makes the users forget that they are separated from each other - often times by thousands of miles - and replicates the same quality interaction between people in the same physical location.

MT. True telepresence is synthetically recreating a face-to-face "around-the-table" meeting experience that must be as natural and reliable as a face to face meeting. It should also be less expensive than a face-to-face meeting, where overseas travel is involved, and be unencumbered by technology and virtually transparent to the participants. Ultimately true telepresence is where you can schedule any type of meeting and simply walk into the room and meet as naturally as being face to face.

BIOS

David Hsieh is a seasoned executive with over 20 years of experience in building and marketing software and services. At Cisco he has marketing responsibility for Cisco's Emerging Technologies -- innovative new businesses created from an internal venture model. Prior to Cisco, Hsieh was a co-founder of FaceTime Communications, a leader in instant messaging solutions for large enterprises. He also served as an VP of Products at WebEx, entrepreneur-in-residence at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Vice President of Product Marketing at Sybase and Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development at LBMS. Hsieh is a graduate of Northwestern University.

Ray Siuta is the marketing manager for the HP Halo Collaboration Studio. He brings 25 years of marketing experience at HP to this position. Prior to this assignment, Siuta served in a variety of marketing and business strategy functions at HP, including business strategy manager in the Ink Supplies Business; marketing manager in the Personal Storage Business; and marketing manager in the Inkjet Business Unit. Siuta also has participated in a number of startup businesses at HP, including calculators, inkjet supplies, personal storage and other investigatory activities related to new business creation. The HP Halo Collaboration Studio represents the latest startup venture that Siuta has played a significant role in launching.

Marc Trachtenberg is a co-founder of Teliris, where he holds the positions of CEO and CTO. In this role, he supplies strategic direction for the corporation. He is also the chief executive officer of Mycroft Inc, the IT and network services company which, with Global Intercasting Ltd, formed Teliris in 2001. Marc is the chief architect of the FACT framework, and is responsible for development of Teliris' infrastructure. He also manages research and development of all Teliris' future product and transport solutions. Marc has over 22 years of experience in leading-edge technology in the areas of infrastructure and transport systems. He architects global networks for international companies and works closely with communication carriers and infrastructure vendors to shape the services and devices of their next-generation offerings.

Steve McNelley is a Co-Founder of DVE Telepresence, a pioneer and leader in the new True Telepresence interactive visual experience. Early in his career, Steve secured several patents for communication technologies, which are now incorporated into millions of web cameras and wireless video-enabled cell phones. In the early 1990s, Steve joined his talents and patents with Jeff Machtig to create a new generation of Telepresence communication mediums. They formed an early pioneering company in the videoconferencing field -- Videotronic Systems, which for years served as a consulting and custom display company in the videoconferencing business.

Howard S. Lichtman is the Founder and President of the Human Productivity Lab, an independent consultancy covering telepresence and effective visual collaboration industries. Mr. Lichtman is also the author of Telepresence, Effective Visual Collaboration and the Future of Global Business at the Speed of Light (2006) on the emerging telepresence industry and was a contributing author to Emerging Technologies for Teleconferencing and Telepresence (2005). He is currently working on the Lab's next major publication: Telepresence Options 2008. Mr. Lichtman is a frequent commentator on telepresence, videoconferencing and effective visual collaboration and his writings on and analysis of the industry have been featured by Reuters, Pro AV Magazine, Killer App Magazine, and CFO Magazine among others.

Download/Print/Save this Article as a .pdf
> cxohpl_exec_roundtable.pdf

Via [CXO Magazine]

Other Human Productivity Lab News:

Telepresence World - Registration for Telepresence World has opened up and Hemisphere Information Services has extended a discount of $100 off the registration fee to friends of the Human Productivity Lab. Get the details Here: http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/telepresenceworld/

Telepresence World Magazine - The new issue of Telepresence World Magazine is now on-line at: http://www.telepresencemagazine.com

Howard S. Lichtman, President of the Human Productivity Lab, recently spoke at the telx conference: "Inside the Carrier Hotel Meet-Me-Room". Here is video of his remarks. He is introduced by telx Chief Strategy Officer Hunter Newby who we interviewed in April 2006.

The Lab's YouTube Channel has now gone over half a million video views!