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Telepresence market heats up with major vendor announcements

Tony Chan | March 25, 2008 | 0 Comments

Competition in the market for high-definition videoconferencing, often referred to as telepresence, heated up this week with all the major systems vendors announcing initiatives to drive sales of both systems and services. All the main systems vendors, including Cisco, Tandberg, Polycom, and HP made major pitches with partnership announcements, new product enhancements or customer successes.

The latest announcement comes from Tata Communications, who launched its version of a global telepresence service based on Cisco’s TelePresence platform. The Tata service will be delivered over its global IP and MPLS network infrastructure and make Tata Communications the first Asian service provider to achieve Cisco Certified TelePresence Connection status. BT and Sprint were awarded the same certification last June.

Tata’s announcement with Cisco follows a flurry of announcements by the network equipment maker’s main competitors in the area, Polycom and Tandberg, who took advantage of the VoiceCon Conference in Orlando, Florida to launch their own salvos on the same day.

Tandberg launched a global managed telepresence solution with Nortel. Through a non-exclusive global agreement, the two companies will jointly deliver fully-managed telepresence and high-definition videoconferencing solutions to enterprise users. The solution will be offered through service providers or directly from Nortel, who will integrate the system within corporate networks.

At the same time, Polycom announced that it has expanded its relationship with Microsoft to include compatibility between its solutions and Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007.

Not to be left out, HP launched its HP Halo Collaboration Centre, a single-screen system that compliments the company’s three-screen Halo Collaboration Studio. At the same time, HP announced that AstraZeneca, Dow Chemical and Toshiba have signed up for Halo, joining ABN Amro, AMD, AIG Financial Products Corp., BHP Billiton, General Electric Commercial Finance, Novartis and PepsiCo.

According to Wainhouse Research, a specialist in video conferencing-related research, the market for Telepresence service is still young and generated $40 million of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2007.

The figure pales against an overall room videoconferencing market worth over US$1 billion. Shipments of room videoconferencing systems was 212,630 units in Q4 2007, an increase of 29.7% over the same period a year earlier, according to Wainhouse’s Q4-2007 Videoconferencing SpotCheck Report released last month.

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