By Dawn Bushaus, Telephony Magazine

So far, most telepresence vendors have been myopically focused on getting their proprietary systems into the hands of customers, but service providers caution that they need to start thinking now about how to interconnect their systems in order to avoid islands of technology that can't be bridged.

"Right now vendors are only worried about their own piece of market share," said Michael Brandofino, president and CEO of Glowpoint, a video managed service provider. "I've had this [interoperability] conversation with Cisco and HP and they've said, "We don't care right now; we'll deal with it later'," he said. "That's fine, but in the video space, we've already had so many starts and stops, the reputation of the technology is at risk."

For their part, Cisco Systems and Hewlett Packard, two of the most prominent telepresence vendors, say they are thinking about interoperability. HP, for example, has been working with videoconferencing vendor Tandberg to make the HP Halo telepresence system backward compatible with existing videoconferencing deployments. "The introduction of our gateway in the fourth quarter of 2007 was an acknowledgment that customers have an investment in standards-based videoconferencing," said Darren Podrabsky, marketing manager for HP Halo.

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