StrAIT Blogging

I attended a meeting of the Greater Houston Partnership’s Technology Cluster Council committee today. It was held at the local Cisco offices. As part of that meeting we got briefings on various Cisco technologies. The subject that really got my attention was the demonstration of Cisco’s TelePresence. Just to be clear, I have no commercial or personal relationship with Cisco or any Cisco employees and will not receive any compensation for what I say. My opinions are strictly my own.

The reason that the TelePresence demo got me excited is that 1) I hate business travel and 2) it could be a major benefit to midsize companies, my primary market. For me, the glamour wore off of business travel long, long ago. Business travel is very important for doing most business and a vital part of building relationships but it’s hugely inefficient. My view is that today people need to meet face to face to build relationships but most other work can be done remotely with the right technology. I want to emphasize that it usually takes several meetings and one-on-one time over an extended period to build good working relationships, so I accept the need for such travel. I’m just saying that today technology offers us a way to minimize the marginal trips. I have had briefings on other video conferencing systems in the past from LifeSize and others but on slightly older technology.

We were taken into a room arranged very much like the images below.

We connected with a person at one of the Cisco offices in California. He then proceeded to run through the features of the system. What I noticed was the attention to details. As the person in California moved from one end of his table to the other, his voice tracked out of the corresponding speaker in our room so that his voice and image drew your eyes to the same place. The resolution was very high quality. We didn’t get into depth on the technical specifications but you can research that topic at the link provided above. If found that keeping the screens at table level made me feel more like the remote site was local. They said that they would have a real-time translation capability very soon (I got permission to say that!) which will be huge. You will be able to have a meeting with an international trading partner and be able to hear your native language and/or see subtitles in your native language. I hope the system will be able to produce a printed transcript of the meeting minutes but that didn’t come up and I forgot to ask.

My imagination got fired up when they mentioned using Wacom tablets with the system. I immediately thought of the model shown below.

I am a manufacturing engineer, IT guy (i.e., geek) and commercial photographer (alas, only part time). I am a very visual person. I visualized a group of people collaborating over a drawing or photograph. Now imagine one of these tablets in front of every chair in the conference room (I’m being creative, not practical). One person has control of the document being discussed. Others can annotate the location of their comments (like drawing a circle around an area of the document) so the editor can make changes. The image is displayed on a screen devoted to presentation materials like the projected white area which appears below the center of the table in the smaller conference room (bad idea) or the overhead screen shown in the larger conference room (good idea). When I asked about this the response is that it’s on their radar (my words) but it is a very hard problem. From that I’m assuming that they are sensitive about that being a good idea but made no commitments about where or if it is on their product roadmap. That’s a fair response since it is a very hard problem.

Now on to my next fantasy. This is a very expensive system. Well beyond the budgets of many midsize companies and all small companies. Let’s imagine Cisco seeding most major cites with conference centers containing several of these meeting rooms. Those conference centers take reservations from the public for video conferences. These systems are complex to build but we were told they are designed to be easy to manage, so the IT support resources should be minimal. To extend beyond the initial locations Cisco sets up a franchise-like operation which allows business partners to build additional centers in each area. Eventually, each urban hub has a collection of these conference centers. At that point, we may have to drive across town but that’s way better than driving to airports, flights, rental cars, hotels, etc.

If any Cisco people read this I hope some of my enthusiasm finds its way into product roadmaps and partner channel management plans. In any event, I appreciated the demo. If anyone has a similar fantasy please post a comment. That’s all for now.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

3 Responses to “Cisco TelePresence Briefing Review”