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Tandberg says standards needed to promote telepresence

Tony Chan | June 13, 2008 | 0 Comments

Video communications specialist Tandberg will rely on a standards-based approach to drive growth of its telepresence systems – branded Experia.

Lars Ronning, Tandbeg’s president, Asia Pacific, excluding China and Japan, told CommsDay that while telepresence has seen greater adoption and awareness in the industry, one of the key differentiators for the company against its competitors is the adoption of ITU standards to enable cross-platform video communications.

“The main difference that separates us from our competitors is actually the fact that we are standardizing on ITU standards as the backbone for our technology,” Ronning said. “That is important because through that, you can actually connect to any standards-supporting system in the world. It doesn’t have to be a Tandberg system, as long as they support the ITU standards, we can talk to them with our telepresence/Experia system.”

During a demonstration to CommsDay, Tandberg staff was able to dial out to his desk from the boardroom where the interview was taking place.

“That is actually a big different because we believe that a company will buy a system like this to increase the level of information they get to their top executives in the boardroom,” Ronning said. “So what happens is the information you need is not on the far end side? Do you shut the call and find that person? Or in Tandberg’s point of view, they can just dial and find that person – and that person can be at a different office, in a home office, on Web system in a hotel. So for us, it is very important that you can dial and find that information and bring it into the boardroom. With a 3G gateway, you can even call to a 3G phone.”

While he points out that telepresence systems have been around since the late 80’s in the form of proprietary boardroom video communications systems that typically required a technician to operate, Ronning says that the market is finally taking off with growing awareness in the market place.

Drivers for video communications including the need to reduce carbon emissions by limited corporate travel, a desire to avoid the increased complexity of travelling today (security and delays), need to increased productivity and globalization, which has forced companies to operate across different regions, improve time to market, and shorten decision making processes.

At the same time, the performance and availability of increasingly affordable networks have matured to support video, he said.

According to Ronning, the video communications market is growing at an average of 25% globablly, while Tandberg’s revenues are growing at some 50%. In Asia, Tandberg’s share of the market ranges from 28%-29% in India, 35%-40% in South East Asia, and 50% in Australia.

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