TW2007 Day 2: Tom Jackson, Mission Benefits CEO

2007.06.05 by John Serrao

Tom Jackson, current CEO of Mission Benefits and the former CEO of the early telepresence company Telesuite, started his speech with an interesting question - how do we take telepresence to the masses? His answer (and some other industry experts agree) is publically available telepresence.

His main argument for the need of publically available telepresence is related to the cost of telepresence systems versus their usage. Even in the highest usage environments, systems usually top out at 5hr/day of usage according to Tom. With 720 hours in a month, this means the rooms only run about 100 hours a month or just 15%. These rooms cost sometimes half a million dollars and most non-Fortune 100 companies have a hard time justifying that cost, even with the added benefits they know telepresence will bring. In this situation, Tom sees a large market developing.

Due to the price of telepresence, he describes these systems as capital intensive technologies that require exceptionally high use rates to justify their purchase. To explain the relationship, Tom used a rather interesting analogy where he showed that, for a single Airbus A380, that costs $300 million, you could buy 1000 telepresence rooms, which would essentially seed the world with publically available telepresence. According to Tom, speed, convenience, productivity and safety are THE four pillars that help sell these massively large capital goods like telepresence - not 'reduced travel costs.' All of these form the basis of Tom's argument for publically available telepresence.

Tom rounded off his presentation by describing what he thought the ideal publically available telepresence company would look: young, entrepreneur, USD$20 million in capital, network and facilities partners, business friendly site locations, 7-10 member companies, well known CEO, service oriented company and the ability to break even Day 1.