A Moment with Telanetix

2007.06.04 by John Serrao

Today I had the chance to spend some time with our friends over at Telanetix. They had some very interesting telepresence offerings to show off today. Pictured above is their Digital Presence solution - a 4 screen plasma setup that can interact with multiple sites around the world simultaneously. 2 of the 4 side screens display static content, like reports and movies where the 2 center screens display the conference members.

It is an SDTV solution, which may disappoint you, but the upshot is reduced variable costs that come from lower QOS bandwidth requirements. In total, you will only need a 2+ megabit pipe to run this solution. Digital Presence has the ability to adapt to various installation setups and layouts. It can interface with Polycom and Tandberg through universal codecs that give the system some serious legs. Yet, its not an HDTV solution.

The Lab will do a more thorough examination of this and other telepresence choices in our next whitepaper coming out this fall, Telepresence Options.

We also briefly saw the smaller Digital Presence model with two screens at the front of their basecamp. I did not get a lot of details about it but it seems to be a smaller version of the system above and likely has similar strengths and weaknesses. Congratulations to Telanetix for a solid display at Telepresence World this year. We will be talking with them further in the days to come.