Video communications is hip ahead thanks to the growing awareness of telepresence solution.

“For a long time, video was out, nobody wanted it,” says Michael Schellenberg, Head of Competency Centre for Orange Business Services, who launched a global Cisco TelePresence service yesterday at the Cisco Expo 2008 in Hong Kong. “But now with the market awareness of telepresence, video is trendy again, even classic desktop video solutions. It’s like someone threw a match into the market and lit it up again.”
According to Schellenberg, the growth of telepresence is driven not so much by requests from IT departments, but instead by sales to high level executive who see the system and basically “sign the order” right there and then.

“A lot of IT guys that we talk to say that there’s no business case for telepresence purchases, but basically a requirement passed down from CXOs,” he explained. “It’s the blackberry of today for CXOs.”

While this trend hints at indulgence by senior management, the practice will yield benefits in the long run.

“Some companies may see it as a toy, but I believe that some companies see it as a real competitive advantage for the future,” he added. “It takes time to develop a corporate culture to sustain new technologies such as knowledge sharing, collaboration. So companies that start to develop a video culture today and do it effectively will gain a competitive advantage, especially when petrol prices going up and the cost of travel is going up. Organizations that have a video culture in place going into the future will have a real competitive advantage.”

Orange Business Services’ new global Cisco TelePresence service includes a series of professional services, deployment services, incident and problem management, operational support services, as well as optional enhanced service management and optimized network services. In addition, Schellenberg says that the company also offers similar solutions for competing video communications systems from Polycom and Tandberg.

While the technology for telepresence systems is not complicated, the systems do require some customization in terms of location and a lot of high quality bandwidth.
“Biggest challenge right now is not the technology and the network, which is simple, but the physical deployment,” Schellenberg said. “You have to find the right room, the right air conditioning, the right lighting, the right paint. It can take months to put in place a telepresence system.”

In addition, there are enhanced network performance requirements for supporting telepresence systems, he added. “Telepresence is very sensitive to packet loss due to high compression rates – as much as 98%. When you lose some packets, you might end up missing someone’s head during a conference. Telepresence is more sensitive than voice in terms of network performance.” Other variables that impact telepresence performance include jitter and round trip delay.

Compared to the 20kbps of bandwidth required for voice calls, the bandwidth for video communications range from 256kbps for desktop systems, to up to 15Mbps for room-based telepresence systems.

Due to the performance requirements of these systems, bandwidth can become a major cost component, Orange Business Services executives said. In one case, a deployment for the Dubai government costs US$200,000 per month in bandwidth, the company said.

Meanwhile, Cisco Systems revealed two new TelePresence to its portfolio: A personal system with a single 37-inch display and an upgrade to the company’s six-person TelePresence room system that now features triple the seating capacity.