* Company sees increased telepresence in smaller businesses due to decreased cost of the infrastructure and bandwidth
Today, we hear from Dimension Data about its progress with telepresence following an interview we had recently with Dane Martin, a principal consultant for the company. Dimension Data, with more than 11,000 employees, is an IT services and solution provider that helps clients plan, build, support and manage their IT infrastructures. Dimension Data’s Telepresence sales are closely aligned with Cisco and Tandberg.
Today, we hear from Dimension Data about its progress with telepresence following an interview we had recently with Dane Martin, a principal consultant for the company. Dimension Data, with more than 11,000 employees, is an IT services and solution provider that helps clients plan, build, support and manage their IT infrastructures. Dimension Data’s telepresence sales are closely aligned with Cisco and Tandberg.
According to Martin, the Dimension Data’s telepresence business is “very good.” Initially, he saw adoption only among companies with “a large budget and business complexity” and while he’s still working with large companies, he’s seen “increased telepresence in smaller businesses because the cost of the infrastructure and bandwidth has gone down.” He has also observed increased telepresence deployments in the healthcare and education verticals, a trend he attributes in part to development of vertical market “packages” for these industries.
When asked about the biggest challenges, Martin suggested that direct interoperability is one source of difficulty for value-added resellers such as Dimension Data, but that his company works with service provider partners like TATA and Glowpoint to solve multi-vendor interoperability issues.
We asked him if he thought the Skype HD video conferencing model unveiled last month at CES in Las Vegas could ever move into the business market. Martin said he believed the Skype solution could work in a business setting depending on the customer’s needs and that he hoped a wide range of high definition and Telepresence solutions would continue to emerge — suggesting that the broadest possible range of solutions would help the whole telepresence market evolve.
Finally, we talked about how far videoconferencing has come since ISDN video rooms offered poor picture quality and even worse ratings for ease of use — laughing together about the “good old days” with floating noses on screen and mouths that weren’t always synchronous with the speech.
Our thanks to Martin for his observations and insights.
