HP and Cisco travel separate paths to high-end, high-speed video communications

As Cisco and HP promote telepresence as the next big thing in collaboration technology, the engineering and design approaches the companies took to break into the nascent market varied. Both companies found themselves in unusual partnership and dabbling in foreign areas of technology and expertise.

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HP’s Halo telepresence system is a combined product/services offering for conducing virtual meetings, which involves specially designed studio rooms outfitted with high-definition displays, IP video cameras and connected via 45Mbps pipes. The Halo idea was borne out of a collaboration with the movie/animation studio Dreamworks, as the studio approached HP to help it create a better remote meeting and collaboration technology for its artists located in different studios.

“Dreamworks really is responsible for the feel and geometry of the rooms,” says Ken Crangle, general manager of HP's Halo business. “What they're leveraging is their expertise in having you sit down and suspend belief for two hours. They know how to make an image and they know how to make it immersive.”

HP’s diverse workforce played a large part in Halo development -- designers of display, imaging and video, networking and software development and other areas were drawn into the project. HP Labs, the company’s R&D arm, was also brought into the mix.

“We picked up lots of bits and pieces, even from HP's imaging and printing groups and used all of it,” Crangle says. “It’s a classic HP thing; we used our mechanical engineering skills, networking skills, IT management skills, or service delivery skills.”

Cisco, which had some IP video conferencing products and a strong VoIP and messaging business, approached video communications with a clean-slate. The company created a new engineering group of about 100 designers, hiring around 40 from outside the company from places such as Apple’s iTunes group. Much of the gear in the company’s TelePresence 3000 and 1000 products was designed and constructed from almost from scratch.

The IP cameras, codec software, and audio gear were designed and built by Cisco — strange territory for a company of ASIC designers and networking engineers.

“There's a peppering of people from many different backgrounds” in the TelePresence Group says Randy Harrell, director of product marketing for the group. “That's where we got some really good, innovative thinking, because it wasn't just all protocol-heads.”

“It got to the point where we had to go out and build our own Cisco plasma,” because the displays on the market did not fit the form factor and resolution requirements. “And when I say build, I mean we built it the same way the other [consumer] plasma TV makers do it,” he says, right down to visiting the three specialized makers of plasma TV glass in Japan.

Less technical components and details of the TelePresence product were also scrutinized.