The Boardroom ReInvented

AT&T has teamed up with Cisco to take telepresence to the next level. They are re-introducing Telepresence as "The Boardroom Reinvented". Here is what was recently said by Cisco and AT&T TelePresence Live at NRF 2009 with Coach, Planet Retail, Polo Ralph Lauren, & United Rentals.

AT&T Makes $1 Billion Network Infrasructure Investment

AT&T is upgrading network applications such as its VPN, telepresence, unified communications and hosting offerings. The company will expand its network offerings into Asia by offering telepresence in China for the first time and managed IP telephony and LAN services for the first time in China, India, the Philippines and Thailand. AT&T will also increase its data center hosting capacity in three of its U.S. data centers, as well as data centers in Tokyo, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.

Complete Article:

Teleris Takes Another Step in Creating the "Natural" Telepresence Experience

In a recent article there was discussion to the many creative aspects mcessary to helping drive the teepresence experience. As Wainhouse Research have pointed out in their well documented white paper, three things need to be present for Telepresence to be truly valuable. They are the expereince must seem natural (the lifelike hd video, is a big step), this Teliris technology is another major step in meeting criteria #1. Second, telepresence must have the audio and video be synchonized and finally, (three) it must be simple to set up.

The people at Teliris have thrown some interesting info here:
Over the past three months (that would be Q3) meetings increased by 20-25% (Teliris also manages the service, so they have insight into these data).
The average use of the system at Teliris' customers is an impressive 125 hr/mo, or 6 hr/day (for comparison: the average use of videoconferencing is 10.5 hr/mo).
Check out this 8 minute YouTube video (embedded below) done by Marc and available on his blog too (the last minute or so is the coolest!). He demos the Teliris InterACT TouchTable ("no, this is not the Microsoft surface table"). Really amazing to see how he pushes a document across the ocean. (Adapted from http://telcommunicator.blogspot.com/)

View, this video below. You will be amazed as Teliris CEO Marc Trachtenberg, literally pushes a video from New York City across the "table" to a colleague in London.

Cisco and IBM Enhance Banking Experience with Cisco TelePresence and Optimized Self-Service

Companies Will Deliver Enhanced Joint Front Office Solutions for Retail Banking
SAN JOSE, Calif., and ARMONK, N.Y. - November 18, 2008 - Cisco and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the launch of two additional offerings for enhancing the retail banking experience that build on their Front Office Solutions for Retail Banking announced in November 2007. The Optimized Self-Service and Cisco TelePresenceTM solution modules help enable retail banks to use their experts more efficiently for direct client interaction regardless of where they are located or which delivery channel (e.g. phone, Internet, video, telepresence, etc.) they are using for communications.
Today, financial institutions are working closer with customers to provide more personalized and up-to-date products and services that better meet their customers' changing financial needs. Independent of the time of day or the delivery channel that clients utilize, banks are striving to deploy technologies and information technology (IT) architectures that help improve business processes to optimize a collaborative customer experience.



Complete Article....

AT&T and Cisco have a unique telepresence joint offer.

There are two unique features of the AT&T/Cisco telepresence solution offers over other solutions are:

1. AT&T offers this as a fully managed service that includes all of the equipment as part of the solution. This means there is minimal "up-front" equipment costs to commit to.
2. The AT&T Business Exchange offers interconnectivity between any two endpoints on the AT&T Telepresence network. The way that telepresence has been offered in the past requires that the business be fully responsible for the supporting "mpls" network that undergirds the quality of the solution. This means that a business could insure the quality of the connectivity between their own locaitons, but they were essentially "locked" into their own network. This makes the telepresence solution more valuable, since many more site locations are avaialable on this network.

Below is short video with two executives from AT&T and Cisco discussing this breakthrough offer.

One of the most difficult questions to answer in the use of Telepresence is the cost benefit conundrum. As this paper illustrates, there are significant benefits to telepresence that go beyond historical webmeetings and traditional video-conferencing.

In their summary the Wainhouse Research Group conclude:

"Clearly, telepresence systems are delivering the remote meeting experience, including audio-video quality, ease-of-use, and realistic face-to-face environment that executives, product planners, and business managers want. Whether used in business negotiations, candidate job interviews, sales calls, or plain team meetings, telepresence systems are providing business professionals the ability to reduce travel while attending more meetings at the same time. The proof lies in the fact that companies who have deployed telepresence solutions find their systems are used more heavily than is the case for typical videoconferencing room systems. Although costly at first, telepresence systems have successfully addressed the limitations of typical videoconferencing designs. "

You can find a copy of their January 28, 2008 paper entitled "Telepresence vs. Videoconferencing Resolving the Cost/Benefit Conundrum"