Telepresence promises end to corporate travel

Networking giant Cisco is rather proudly trumpeting the sale of its 500th telepresence room, with the promise that it is revolutionising corporate travel by completely avoiding it. For those out of the loop, telepresence is the supercharged offspring of the long-derided videoconferencing technology.

The big difference is that videoconferencing is rubbish and telepresence is really rather good, albeit extremely expensive. This isn't just a marketing gimmick. People who have tried telepresence -- and we have, by the way -- report that it's like meeting in the flesh.

So what's the big deal? A typical telepresence set-up will comprise three high-definition plasma screens butting closely together, with three cameras focused all around a semi-circular conference table, which is replicated at the other end so it looks like you are sitting around one big table. One boardroom sees yours through three screens, and you see theirs through three screens. Multiple directional microphones and speakers mean you can have a conflab with the person facing you while at the other end of the table, those two can talk away to each other too.

If you throw enough bandwidth at the problem -- and we mean a lot of bandwidth -- there is no latency in images or sound, so it really feels uncannily like being there. You can see people's expressions when you are talking to them and anticipate when they are about to interrupt.

But what's the catch? Well, how about $300,000 (£150,000)? That's what each six-person Cisco telepresence system costs and you need two of them to complete the circle. The Halo system from rival HP can cost up to $350,000 (£175,000) and Polycom's RealPresence can cost $200,000 (£100,000). And then there is a bandwidth -- you will need a dedicated 10-15Mbps between telepresence rooms, which could be cost between £4,000 and £6,000 a month per site.

At this kind of money, the appeal is probably limited to wealthy corporates, but these are the guys who tend to fly the farthest and the most often anyway. Analyst Wainhouse Research has looked into the economics of telepresence, and assumes that a system costs around £150,000 and bandwidth around £4,000 per month. Over a three-year period, if the room is used for 20 hours a week (admittedly a fairly ambitious utilisation rate), meetings would cost just over £100 an hour. With four people in conference, this would be £25 an hour, considerably cheaper than most forms of travel.

Carbon benefits

These are, of course, hypothetical scenarios, but you can see how there might be a business case for adopting telepresence if you have a lot of international offices and executives going to and fro.

Wainhouse Research evaluated how Cisco used its own telepresence technology internally. Between October 2006 and September 2007, Wainhouse estimated that Cisco spent £25m on the technology and networking costs on 161 internal telepresence rooms. It had 31,381 telepresence meetings worldwide in this period, 6,643 of which were in lieu of travelling. This avoided 15,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions. Sales improved, employees were more productive and with other benefits thrown in, telepresence contributed a net benefit of £120m. Now Cisco may have been at the extreme end with rooms occupied for 60 per cent of the day -- skewed perhaps by using rooms to demonstrating how cool telepresence is to sales leads and journalists.

There's a long way to go before most big companies are convinced of the merits. Cisco claims to have sold 500 units to date to around 100 companies. David Molony, an analyst with Ovum, estimates that just 225 companies so far have bought telepresence from the top five vendors (Cisco, HP, Polycom, Tandberg and Teliris).

The prohibitive costs of current systems means that for most of us, we may have to wait a few years before the technology is accessible. In the meantime, you could pop along to your local Regus. It's planning to open 50 public telepresence rooms in its serviced offices. Alternatively, go to YouTube for a low-rent but strangely compelling recording of a telepresence session.

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