HP Halo: It's Divine Videoconferencing
"Nothing can replace a face-to-face meeting, but for everything else this does the job," said Darren Podrabsky, worldwide marketing manager for Halo, during a one-on-one teleconference with the CRN Test Center in mid-April.
With a six-figure list price to start, Halo wasn't a solution we could easily test-drive in the lab-- so we visited HP for an evaluation of a unit that was up and running.
Testers traveled to HP's office in midtown Manhattan to review the system. Imagine walking into a dedicated room that's empty except for a semi-circular table with six chairs around its outer edge. The chairs face three gigantic LCD displays, from above each of which a large camera lens stares at you. Centered atop all that is another large display, with icons navigable using the mouse on the table before you.
A nav bar at the top of the screen shows cities that give way to companies, which lead to buildings, and then to rooms. Clicking on a room (assuming its door is open) will send an invitation to the "concierge" on the far end. If accepted, the three large monitors light up to reveal a mirror image of the room you're in, populated with life-size images of the people you're about to collaborate with.
The realism was a bit eerie at first, like spying through windows into another room. "This is a room replacement," said Podrabsky. "It's a private studio finely tuned for a consistent, highly immersive experience that's just like a private meeting." Making this possible on the customer side is an array of between 50 and 60 distinct devices--each with its own IP address--including multiple servers, a router, switches, A/V systems and codecs, and even room lighting controls. Despite this seeming complexity, Podrabsky claimed that about 90 percent of trouble calls are still solved by HP staff remotely.
"Halo is designed to be part of a managed service. It's for companies that want to completely outsource the deployment, maintenance, break/fix and management of teleconferencing and collaboration, and not have to involve their own IT staff," he said.
Such companies will, of course, have to pay for the luxury. At the entry level, a single-screen room costs about $120,000 plus $9,900 a month for connection and maintenance services. Part of HP's solution--and what sets it apart--is a dedicated 45-Mbps connection to the Halo Video Exchange Network. "HVEN allows the kind of experience with a telco-neutral carrier and latency that's barely noticeable," said Podrabsky. HP is in talks with major hotels around the world to install HVEN connections, he said, where clients and branch-office personnel could go for meetings. From there, a DS3 tail circuit could connect to a customer's room. The system also supports off-HVEN connection with H.323 devices from Tanberg and Polycom. "There's no firewall to traverse, no peering of networks is necessary; it doesn't use the customer network at all." All communications are 256-bit encrypted, and fees include unlimited access to the network.
Halo's high-quality images, omnipresent sound and realtime responsiveness made it seem as if everyone was in the same room. But as immersive as the experience was, there are still two things missing. One is eye contact. Unless people look straight into the camera when speaking, they appear on screen to be looking down rather than straight ahead. This is because the cameras, like most Webcams, are mounted above the display screen. So you can never really look someone in the eye.
More important, Halo is missing a channel program. "Channel partners are a strong part of our future strategy," Podrabsky said, adding that the HP is currently adapting a strategy to include resellers. "We will work with service partners and network service providers such as AT&T and others." He would not provide a time line for such plans to be made public, and until that time, the Test Center withholds its recommendation of Halo.