Continuing with the lost "San Diego Sessions", Telepresence Options publisher Howard Lichtman had a chance to sit down with Aaron McCormack, CEO of BT Conferencing.  The two discuss telepresence conferencing, BT's portfolio of multiple telepresence conferencing solutions from Cisco, Polycom, Tandberg, and Teliris, the network and managed services that BT Conferencing provides to simplify deployment, the coming BT telepresence CoIN and the future of telepresence at BT.  After the transcript of the interview there is an update on telepresence at BT.  Sneak Peak... Coming Soon: Managed Services for Cisco TelePresence, Polycom, Tandberg, and an inter-networking solution to connect Cisco TelePresence customers to their vendors, joint venture partners, and customers on the BT Global network. 







Howard:  Now you guys are interesting, Cisco is selling Cisco, Teliris is selling Teliris, Polycom is selling Polycom, and you guys are selling everyone.  

Aaron:  ...And ourselves, the special sauce of BT conferencing and BT in general.  So it's fantastic to see everyone here innovating like mad, on telepresence equipment, better screens, better codecs, better rooms, and our job is to take the best that the market can offer and put it in the hands of the customer in a way that gets them to use it.  My main point is that value isn't created when the customer buys the equipment; the value is created when the customer uses it, 24 hours a day. Hopefully.

Howard:  So it is so much more then just the equipment in the room, it's the network it's the management, it's the concierge-class services. What do you do to support telepresence end points in the field?

Aaron:  Well I mean right now we are innovating a whole range of lines, the industry is pretty much in its infancy. One of the benefits of being a small agile company within a big company like BT is that we are able to experiment with all different providers in terms with how they are fitting with customers. I think it will take a few more months before we place bigger bets say investing in a higher class quality concierge service or neutral network interconnect point for inter-working telepresence across network infrastructures or those sort of bigger bets.  So right now what we are doing is selling as much telepresence to as many customers as possible and learning as fast as we can as we go along about what's really going to be the repeatable capabilities that they want for the future.

Howard:  I mentioned a couple of folks but I wanted to make sure I mentioned the entire portfolio.

Aaron:  So Polycom, Cisco, Teliris and Tandberg, when their stuff comes out soon.

Howard:  OK, so you guys have the traditional video conferencing solutions?

Aaron:  All the video conferencing solutions, managed collaboration based on web conferencing and audio conferencing. The heart of BT conferencing really is based on managed, audio and web conferencing and of course with our parent BT, we've got this wonderful birthright of having a huge MPLS network around the planet, 120 countries or so, about 5 and 1/2 thousand enterprises on that, every financial company being connected to it because we underpin Reuters financial feed.  When you think about the fact that high quality data networking is now penetrating every building of every company, the customers are buying into that converged infrastructure and are ready to setup for high end video and telepresence right now.

Howard:  Let's talk about that right now, the network is key, you mentioned 120 countries you mentioned MPLS backbone are you guys going to build a COIN?  What I refer to as a Community of Interest Network which is a network that would not only connect folks in an overlay existing end points but connect them to other business partners and vendors?

Aaron:  Well we have that already for traditional video, with that clunky old ISDN stuff that we do that on, but it works well, in a managed environment for customers. That capability can be extended over the Internet. Again it's difficult to raise that to the telepresence bar, because guaranteed quality of service is so important that the network layer to bring through the rich telepresence experience.  

We're working right now on making sure BT customers within our MPLS domain can talk to each other, so we're trying to experiment on building, if you like an extranet within the BT cloud. The challenge of building one where any telepresence user can talk to any other telepresence user, much like two other telephones talk to each other today, the challenge with that is to making the networks interoperate and on top of that making sure the units can interoperate in a meaningful way. So that's going to be someways off, we have a large enough estate of existing customers on BT MPLS who will take telepresence services so we can cover a good portion of the market just within our own community.  And I think that if people find real value in having telepresence talk to telepresence across infrastructures whether it is us or someone else they will innovate into that space and create what I would call a "neutral access point" or not, for internet terms a "NAP" for telepresence users to come together. [Editor's Note: Since this interview was conducted BT and Cisco announced in December that BT was the first carrier to successfully trial the intra-company business capabilities of Cisco TelePresence on the BT network allowing BT TelePresence customers to connect to joint venture partners, vendors, and customers.]

Howard:  I know you guys eat your own dog food, I know your installing some telepresence systems right now, I know you've got how many video conferencing endpoints?

Aaron:  In BT?  Oh hundreds, hundreds I don't even know the number but we manage the entire internal service, with a mixture with IP some of it's still based on ISTN, as we pull IP circuits into all the different buildings we've acquired a lot of companies in BT in the last months and years and getting them on board as well.  So we're just installing telepresence from a couple a different partners we are using just for internal use but also then to meet the huge demand to showcase the products. I think that Teliris, Cisco, Polycom, we don't all have the collective space to bring all the customers in to see the wondrous thing that it is. So we're hoping to use much of the time in the internal implementations to let the customers come in and try it for itself.  

Howard:  Excellent, final question you had a statistic in your keynote speech the other day, on the amount of carbon and the amount that you've been able to, I think in your own internal efforts, what was that number?

Aaron:  98,000 Tons of Carbon that would have been emitted if all of the meetings that we enabled over video and audio collaboration if people had actually traveled face-to-face to make them happen. 98,000 tons of carbon emission reduction and 840,000 meetings that contributed to that. Now, what is interesting about that is that those meetings are as easily enabled by audio as much as by video collaboration.  

And so the key return on investment question is, for the end users, at what point do we want to upgrade from a telephone experience to one that involves video equipment and the costs that are associated with that.  The savings are identical, in terms of carbon footprint, work life balance improvement, reduced travel time, and employee production.  So all of that can be contributed by the traditional collaboration methods the question is at what point do you really need the human factors element that telepresence gives?


Howard:  OK, what's the future for telepresence at BT, and did I forget to ask you anything?

Aaron:  No, ask me again in 2 years, what the future will be and I'll give you a great resume of what we did in the last 24 months. At this point the way I read it, is that the innovation that's happened across the likes of Cisco, Polycom, Teliris, and Tandberg, isn't yet run. There are particularly innovations around hooks, and API's that make these things easier to manage and integrate with soup-to-nut collaboration environments, so we'll be filling these gaps where we can, putting as much of a concierge service around it as possible, because again implementing technology can be tricky and we help people out but our real special source is to get people to love it and use it and keep using it and that's what we're going to be focused on.

Howard:  Ok, well thank you, and thank you for joining us.

BT Conferencing Update - Since our Interview with BT in June of last year, Aaron and his team have been as busy as a cat on a hot tin roof.  In September, Aaron was interviewed by Computer Business Review Online. In December, Cisco announced that BT was the first network to trial the inter-company collaboration capabilities of Cisco TelePresence, which allowed BT TelePresence clients to connect to others on the BT network.  In January, BT and Cisco sponsored the publication of A New Mindset for Corporate Sustainability which brought together experts from five countries using Cisco TelePresence to develop best practices for organizations to become sustainability-driven. 

So what is in the cards for the future of telepresence at BT? 
In  March the company will be rolling out a managed service offering that will support Cisco TelePresence solutions and include management of TelePresence video networking infrastructure, concierge-class reservation and scheduling, help desk services, usage and ROI reporting, and even training for end-users to aid adoption.  The company has an existing partnership with Teliris that supports managed services around the Teliris VirtuaLive telepresence solutions and will be rolling out managed services that will support the Polycom RPX and TPX telepresence offerings and Tandberg Experia telepresence solutions in Q2/Q3.   In Q4 the company is looking to extend upon their existing network trials supporting Intercompany communications between Cisco TelePresence end-points with an inter-networking offering that will allow TelePresence customers on the BT Global Network to connect to vendors, joint venture partners, and customers that are also on the BT network. Kudos to Aaron and the team at BT Conferencing who are fielding one of the most sophisticated visions in the industry!