* Digital Presence from Telanetix
A few weeks ago, I wrote about large-scale telepresence systems that allow people to meet face-to-face, virtually. These systems, from companies like HP and Cisco, employ dedicated networks to send huge amounts of video and audio around the world in real-time. The systems, which start at about $300,000 and go up from there, are aimed at companies like those in the Fortune 500 that can justify the expense.
Now I’ve learned about a telepresence solution that’s about one-tenth the cost of those other systems. It uses your regular in-house network and the Internet backbone to transmit the images and sound. Before you scream “Not on my network!” hear me out about how this solution works. Your company might find it to be a pretty attractive alternative to expensive travel and audio-only teleconferences.
The solution is called Digital Presence from Telanetix. You need to understand a bit about the Telanetix pedigree before you make judgments on the telepresence-over-IP approach. The founders of Telanetix have deep experience in developing technologies to deliver multimedia content (movies, music, etc.) on demand over the Internet. While working for companies like Digital On-Demand and RedDotNet, the Telanetix team of engineers learned a lot about how to compress and stream multimedia content to the masses very efficiently.
These guys took their experience to Telanetix, where they have developed software-based CODECs (coders and decoders) based on MPEG-4. CODECs are usually built into hardware; Telanetix has done it in software. As a result, the solution is standards-based rather than proprietary, and costs are kept low.
You might think this would force a compromise on image quality. Not so, according to Telanetix founder and CEO Tom Szabo. “The result is an immersive, real-time meeting,” says Szabo. “It feels real.”
The solution is peer-to-peer, so there is no central server that initiates or controls the meetings. There is no need for an expensive custom room or studio environment; any regular room can be used as a meeting point. Each end point, or meeting room, is equipped with the Digital Presence software installed on industry standard Linux-based Dell dual-Pentium servers; wall-mounted large screen displays for viewing the other meeting rooms; a camera system for capturing the in-room images; and the controls necessary to connect to the transmission network, which happens to be your regular IP network.
There is a traffic shaper application built into the Telanetix software (or you can use another vendor’s traffic shaper) to ensure the multimedia packets aren’t delayed by regular network traffic. As a rule of thumb, Telanetix recommends about 1MB of bandwidth for each screen on the system, but a value-added reseller (VAR) can help you optimize your bandwidth so you don’t over-buy the size of your pipe. Digital Presence can connect any number of end points in a single meeting, as long as you have enough bandwidth to support the traffic.
The large-scale telepresence systems from HP and Cisco make the user experience easy by offloading all the control and maintenance to a leased central administration hub. Telanetix makes the user experience easy by building into their solution one-touch control and simple interfaces. For example, if you want to conduct an ad hoc meeting between your offices in New York and Los Angeles, a meeting participant on either end can simply touch the control button that opens the channel on the other end. There’s no need to schedule a meeting, and no need to get an intermediate operator to make the connection.
This sounds like a very cool solution for those of us who don’t have a half-million dollar budget for telepresence. You can learn more about Digital Presence from Telanetix from the data sheet and the FAQs.
Oh, and Telanetix just recently acquired VoIP provider AccessLine Communications. This gives Telanetix the ability to serve its customers with unified communications including voice and telepresence over your regular IP network. This should help small and midsized companies get that “big company” presence, even if they aren’t in the Fortune 500.
