Cisco Steps Into Telepresence With New HD Videoconferencing Line
12:00 AM EDT Mon. Oct. 23, 2006
From the October 23, 2006 issue of CRN
Page 2 of 3
No. 2 videoconferencing player Tandberg, New York, is expected to launch a telepresence line early next year.
Teliris, also in New York, earlier this month launched an upgraded version of its telepresence offering.
And Austin, Texas-based start-up LifeSize Communications, one of the first companies to market high-definition videoconferencing products, said its channel partners already are building telepresence rooms with its offerings.
While the new breed of high-end telepresence solutions may be far out of reach for most customers, with prices nearing $1 million for a two-room rollout depending on the vendor, the technology is poised to move downstream over time to a bevy of medical, financial, manufacturing, government, retail and commercial customers.
Competition aside, other vendors and their channel partners said Cisco's splashy entrance into the telepresence market with its new Cisco TelePresence Meeting line—a push scheduled to begin Monday with a launch event in New York—will create a boon for all flavors of IP videoconferencing, be it telepresence, high-definition or even traditional.
"It's like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla that validates the space," said Todd Luttinger, president of Videre Conferencing. The Quincy, Mass.-based company expects up to 40 percent of its $10 million business this year to come from high-definition videoconferencing solutions, primarily from LifeSize, he said. It's a profitable business that typically provides 40 percent margins, he said.
For Cisco, however, the pitch is about more than just technology, it's about the broader communications experience, which, of course, is built on top of its own networking platform. "It's moving the Cisco conversation from the glass room [the IT department] to the board room," said Edison Peres, vice president and chief go-to-market officer for worldwide channels at Cisco, San Jose, Calif. "We're beyond convergence. This is the next level."
As Cisco makes the move toward providing "the human network," its latest marketing catchphrase to describe the collaboration and communication that it wants its technology to power, channel partners will need to move with it, Peres said. "Successful partners are the ones that will evolve with it," he said. "We're offering a level of communications that wasn't possible before, and the deployment of these [solutions] is global, where partners in the past have been very local. It means the utility of our partner ecosystem is going to be at an all-time high."
As part of its new partner enablement initiative, Cisco has pledged to incorporate solution providers earlier into product launch strategies so that the channel is trained and ready to deploy technology as soon as it becomes available.
NEXT: The Telepresence Channel Play
