Test-driving Telepresence
Charlene and I had a chance to test out Telepresence last week. Telepresence is a new product from Cisco — essentially a new form of videoconferencing that's designed to be as realistic as possible. I sat in a specially designed room on Boxborough …
Context & Ripple Effects
This hands-on look at Cisco's [[e:TelePresence]]-style room system lands two months after Cisco completed its March 2007 acquisition of WebEx, which analysts framed as a Web 2.0 platform play aimed at collaboration and explicitly at the SMB market. TelePresence is the other end of that strategy: instead of browser-based meetings, it sells physical realism through a specially designed room, as this Boxborough test drive illustrates.
First-order effects
- Enterprise buyers evaluating the system face a new purchasing category — purpose-built rooms rather than desktop videoconferencing kits — with Cisco as the vendor setting the realism benchmark.
Second-order effects
- Cisco now spans both ends of the collaboration market at once: premium room-based telepresence up top and the newly acquired WebEx service for SMBs below, squeezing standalone videoconferencing vendors to choose which tier to defend.
Third-order effects
- If realism-driven rooms gain adoption, business travel budgets become the funding source and collaboration infrastructure consolidates around network owners like Cisco who can bundle bandwidth with endpoints.
The trend: Enterprise collaboration is stratifying into a premium realism tier sold by network-equipment makers and a low-cost software tier, with Cisco positioning itself on both after the WebEx acquisition.