At Frost & Sullivan we're into a second year of providing in-depth coverage and analysis of the rapidly developing telepresence market.

What has been striking about the responses in research interviews from customers and service providers partners deploying telepresence (yes, vendors too - but they would say that, wouldn't they?) has been an overwhelming agreement on the fast ROI that can be achieved.

Driving this are very high utilization rates for telepresence - far higher than ever achieved with video conferencing. This is largely down to the sheer usability of telepresence solutions.

Certainly, the high quality images and sound presented by telepresence are a key factor. This allows people to work productively on telepresence calls for several hours continuously, without experiencing the sort of communications fatigue one gets pretty quickly on a conference call, and not long after on a standard video conferencing session.

But we have also found that the integrated service element of telepresence is a major differentiator of this visual communications solution.

Remember that telepresence is not just about VC with larger video displays.

Several independent video screens must be driven by several codecs at each room location, which must then be linked to an often dedicated network that must provide a highly consistent quality of service.

It takes a well-designed and tightly-controlled managed service to pull together all the components of the telepresence solution to delivery the usability customers demand – and which in turn drives the utilisation and ROI we are hearing about.