Video with Microsoft's OCS

I so enjoy reading articles where people don't really understand what they are writing about. I have participated in telepresence, MS roundtable and traditional video conferences numerous times. There is no comparison. I fully admit that TP is not for the cheap and if cost is the factor, than round table or other solutions are fine. If you are a multi-national company that spend millions on travel and expense between countries and wants to do telepresence where you can see the other person as if they are physically in front of you than the cost is not substantial. But, don't try to claim that 2K worth of audio products will make them the same, that is not even close.

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.

Would you build your own car? You are forgetting the integration, the time investment, the maintenance, the overhead of a rube goldberg system assembled by the local geek. In the end, it would cost a whole lot more than $250K....

I'd have to agree with this commenter. The old adage that "you get what you pay for" is as true for telepresence as it is for most things in life. I know that my company has had a great experience working with a firm called LifeSize Video Communications, out of Austin, TX. Their high definition videoconferencing has performed superbly in our experience. And while we could have cobbled something together on the cheap instead, the time and aggravation involved in putting these systems together and keeping them up and running would more than outweigh any savings.

While it's true you can bolt a gasoline engine on the back of a horse to make it move faster - the results just aren't the same as buying a car.

Let's face it. Standard definition video conferencing over ISDN lines are awful business experiences. The session setups hurt (if they actually connect), the vacuum tube TVs are low resolution and the rooms they fit in are hard surfaces with bad acoustics and dim lighting. People didn't put the energy into the complete experience as modern High Definition and telepresence engineers do.

Surprise, these things matter.

I disagree with Ira that some organizations are better off tweaking their lowsy implementations. The room with the bad audio has been tainted. Adding ceiling mics won't bring the users back. A whole new approach will. Enter HD. While I agree that not every organization can value the careful experience engineering of a telepresence suite at a quarter million dollars each (usually more), surely most can afford to invest $20-$50k to redo the gear and the room. That's about what you'd spend on improving your home media center, so it's about the right budget. Accelerating a 286 really isn't much of a return on investment no matter how inexpensive the accelerator card might be. Better to gut the box and enter the 21st Century with a fresh view.

Check out my blog: http://www.brockmann.com.

I live about 10 min from Cisco and I've been in their $600k+ telepresence room more times than I can count. It's nice, but not a magical miracle solution. Even if the network and environment requirements for TP weren't outrageous (they are), it's not worth 100x the cost or even 10x. A well-architected OCS solution with high-quality audio/video can provide 99% the experience at a fraction of the cost.

I've participated in dozens of all-day OCS conferences and never felt out of touch with remote users. All in all, when used well, I think it's a great solution.

Tim Greene wrote a great article on the benefits of a mixed UC and telepresence environment including making salient points on the ability to upgrade UC/VC to near telepresence levels at a fraction of the cost.

as i mentioned i m y subject the rates must be lesser to attract people towards urself