Recently in tele-presence Category

Tech Data's Senior Product Sales Champion for UC was at the event last night. I spent a few minutes chatting with him about his position, but couldn't really get a definition of UC out of him. Polycom and tele-presence are what he pushes - to me that's not really UC. HD Voice? No we leave that up to Polycom and the vendors. Seems even a tech company has a problem wrapping the head around Unified Communications. (UC doesn't mean the latest gadgets).

XO has some components to build a UC bundle - overlay IVR, Broadsoft SIP Trunking, some straight forward Hosted PBX (with a limited feature set), and Hosted Exchange for the email integration piece.

If the UC Champion thinks UC is tele-presence and video conferencing, what does that say about well defined the term is in the Industry?

We hear a lot about Unified Communications today. UC this and UC that. Even Cloud Telephony and UCaaS. It's kind of crazy.

The main buzz is around the savings from UC. If you have a distributed workforce, then Unifying on a Communications platform with a collaboration module can improve productivity.  "IT leaders argue the technology can help businesses increase productivity, cut costs and reduce their carbon footprint," according to a NetworldWorld article.

The productivity gains only come if the technology is easy to use, reliable, and intuitive. By intuitive, I mean, that unlike some CRM and telco software platforms, the software was created with the user in mind and doesn't require a lot of thinking on how to do something. It needs to be like WYSIWYG. "Getting people to change the way they work required his team to pay special attention to training," states Mike Close, CTO of Danone, from the same NW article. Danone rolled out a UC system globally.

Anything done by committee means it will be drawn out and frustrating. The current collaboration software I have seen are really just document sharing applications and some white boarding online.  Users need something like Bud Light's Drinkability and Drawing.  Maybe a desktop sharing app or white board where everyone can "take control".  But I digress.

UC's benefits come from a geographically dispersed workforce or a virtual office setting. It's similar with VoIP. If you are making a lot of in-state calls to other branches, the cost savings from VoIP diminish. When people are working on the same project but aren't in the same building or city, making progress is tricking because audio conference calls, IM/chat and email are one-dimensional. Video conferencing, webinars, document sharing, white boarding - all can lead to productive gains.  It isn't a monetary gain per se, but what company doesn't want to be more productive? Plus when you are getting stuff done, employees are more satisfied. No one likes being stuck on the perverbial treadmill.

The carbon footprint is a big issue today. All about Being Green. With video conferencing, especially tele-presence and UC, travel will shrink some. This has a tangible benefit in budget savings but don't discount the carbon footprint shrinkage. 

It looks like a lot of the UC hype is based on Productivity gains and time savings, not so much real actual dollars. Aspect rolled out Microsoft OCS globally and is seeing over $1M in real savings. (Read the story here). So there are real dollar benefits to UC if it is rolled out correctly with proper training.

Now here's where a niche really pays off. 

"Rivulet Communications, whose technology enables flawless HD medical video on the hospital IP network, has raised an $11.5 million round from ATA Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Performance Equity Management and Scorpion Capital Partners... The company won several patents for its technologies, which include its wide-area network Internet Protocol quality of service technology in 2008. ... Its technology helps high priority network traffic avoid bottlenecks, speeding real-time traffic and maintaining video quality. It can be used on existing networks."[TechJournal South]

Tele-Presence and Video Conferencing and HD Voice are services on the growth path, but certainly HD Medical Video is a specialization.

At the IT Expo West, WBS Connect had a great booth that was a Tele-presence suite - fully tricked out. I interviewed Scott Charter, managing partner of WBS Connect, at the show, but after reading IP Business magazine's write-up, I thought that mine would look like a rip-off. 

The key component of the WBS TelePresence offering is that WBS is working on being vendor agnostic or the translator. Right now, Tangberg talks to Tandberg and Cisco to Cisco, but how does Tangberg talk to Cisco's rooms? Using H.264-SVC and WBS Connect as the translator.  It's a great way to put all that transit to work.

During a discussion online, some interesting items popped up.

Companies ban Instant Message. One IT Security Consultant looks at the irony of it here. Tele-Presence is all about improved efficiency in communicating -- no more phone tag, less voicemail, that kind of thing -- but how will that be implemented in a corporate environment that locks it down?

Social networking like LinkedIn and Twitter are becoming commonplace among the marketing set. Maybe instead of banning these things in a corporate environment, you embrace it and set policy. Here's an article from CIO.com on LinkedIn etiquette.

It boils down to tools. Will you give people the tools that they can use to be effective at their position?  If you are that worried about security, do an audit and train your people. Manage by walking around. Most theft is internal or social engineered. You can train against the social engineering, but if someone wants something bad enough they will figure out how to get it. It's just a shame that can't get that passionate and creative about the job.

Andy Abramson writes about how video conferencing from a client company like SightSpeed is better than Cisco's Tele-Presence. On Sept. 22, Brian Carroll is having a tele-seminar on "Email vs. Phone vs. In-Person Meeting". Keith Rosen, a respected sales coach, would tell you that, especially in today's economic climate, nothing beats a face-to-face or a phone call. Keith writes about how Sales 2.0 is diluting inter-personal communications. (If you have ever received an email from someone that using text messaging a lot, you will see what he means).

As one commenter wrote to Andy, Tele-Presence is a richer experience. Well, it should be for equipment that is in excess of $50K per site. Even this price barrier is being removed by companies like WBS Connect leasing out tele-presence rooms for business use.

Another point is that many tele-workers don't want to shave and dress for video conferencing. There's no IT guy at the home office to help with the video conference set-up. Messing with the webcam and the software is a pain and when you have so much to do in 8 hours, dialing a conference bridge is easy. Even that isn't fool-proof as quite a few times stuff has happened to hamper that easy tool.

Maybe the differentiating factor will be personal interaction. When I see couples at restaurants and one or both are on the cell phone, I have to wonder what are they doing. That's a live person that traveled to meet you. Talk to that person. And the yakking in the car while driving WITH other people in the car. This society is in for a wake-up call and it will come when most of us are too weak to fight back.

You can't get a human on the phone but ChaCha pays humans to run your Google search while you are mobile. Go figure. Maybe the differentiator to a sale will be the personal touch.

Is travel is mess? Yes. Will virtual conferences replace real ones like IT Expo West next week? No. It's about the hand-shake; the meals, drinks and ideas shared. It's about getting a read from someone live. That is not easily replaced. That said, tele-presence as a 3-D meeting experience might work for second or third meetings to go over details or brainstorm or for product demos or training.

Video conferencing like SightSpeed and tokbox can replace phone calls (if we can figure out how to make them on demand like a phone call instead of scheduled). And I need to start replacing some IM and email with the phone. I pay for a landline, a VoIP line, and a cell phone. I need to use it more and the keyboard less.