Virtually There: The Telepresence Revolution Takes Shape

Attendees settle into Aeron chairs along an arcing wood conference table studded with microphones and gaze up at an array of cameras and flat-panel displays. Screens flicker to the commands of a wireless mouse and within minutes, executives in an identical room in Oregon are looking down from the bank of monitors. No delay, no feedback, no spotty video.

A Halo collaboration is in session. Attendees can do everything they would in a face-to-face meeting short of shaking hands and swapping business cards. To hear tech executives tell it, this is the way most meetings will soon take place.

Hewlett-Packard's Halo project is arguably the most advanced video collaboration offering on the market, but competitors large and small will soon be nipping at HP's heels. In March, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers told attendees at the company's partner summit that "telepresence" will be a key application in the coming year. "It's the ability to have unified communications set up with a couple of clicks," he said. "It's not just videoconferencing, but real collaboration."

Other smaller vendors such as TeleSuite also are pushing competing solutions, but the reseller community's eyes will likely be on Cisco as the market takes shape. HP currently sells Halo only through its commercial sales force and plans to make it available to VARs only when it's time to reach out to the midmarket.

Although Cisco won't comment on its telepresence plans, it's safe to assume that solution providers will play a key role in selling and deploying the technology once it's ready. "Cisco is behind HP, but not that far behind," says Howard Lichtman, founder of the Human Productivity Lab (HPL), a consultancy studying the emerging telepresence market. "Cisco has the channel as a motivated sales force to sell this in a way I don't think HP will."

Like many telepresence offerings, Halo was born out of necessity. In 2002, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg realized his company couldn't hit production goals without its creative teams. The studio designed a collaboration system itself before taking it to HP, which turned it into Halo.

"We worked for months on how to produce a room like this," says Mark Gorzynski, chief scientist at HP. "DreamWorks was the emotional heart behind this. They make movies and understand cameras, but a project like this takes an understanding of human needs."

The look and performance of Halo is part of that effort. Among the reasons for videoconferencing's slow adoption is that until now, the technology has been too feeble and unpredictable to create a satisfying user experience. The Halo Video Exchange Network (HVEN) is high-bandwidth and full-duplex with no perceptible latency. Halo users can converse and interact the way they do in person, without the stops and starts that make traditional videoconferencing awkward.

This clarity is best conveyed during an actual use of the studio.

"We find that people who are new to this get distracted at first because they're waiting for technological flare-ups that reinforce that they're physically far apart from the party they're talking to," says Ray Siuta, a marketing manager at HP.

Each Halo room also is equipped with a ceiling camera that can zoom down to the tabletop to share a hard-copy presentation that isn't on the network. HP client PepsiCo, for example, uses this feature to show teleconference attendees a close-up view of a new logo design on a bag of chips or a soda can.

Such design elegance comes with a cost. HP's Halo clients, which include Fortune 500 companies such as AMD, pay $400,000 each for the first four rooms, with lower per-room costs at greater volumes, and about $18,000 per month for the maintenance and deployment of the network. These are eye-popping figures, but HP insists the system saves so much in eliminated travel costs that it pays for itself within a few months.

"The monthly charge is the same as the cost to fly a corporate jet for one hour, and it includes all the fiber, the network operations center, a 24-hour concierge...and software upgrades," says Bill Wickes, an R&D manager at HP.