posted by: Mark Cortner
The telepresence market appears to be maintaining its market momentum and acceptance given numerous vendor and carrier announcements over the last several weeks. The most visible infrastructure vendor in these announcements has been Cisco, a strong proponent of visual collaboration technologies. Cisco has been a driving force in the telepresence market and the combined positioning of telepresence to its enterprise and service provider customers is generated several interesting announcements.
Cisco recently announced that it had successfully demonstrated the industry’s first telepresence session across multiple carrier networks. The demonstration occurred coincident with Cisco Live 2009 and consisted of inter-carrier telepresence connections between seven sites on the AT&T, BT, and Tata Communications networks. The demonstration verified the technical ability for a business using Cisco’s telepresence solution to utilize telepresence services to collaborate with any other business or location that is also utilizing Cisco’s telepresence solution.
The ability to initiate and reliably conduct a telepresence session across multiple carrier networks will resonate with large global enterprises, as they frequently utilize multiple carriers to provide network connectivity to their worldwide facilities. Furthermore, the ability to conduct an inter-carrier telepresence sessions enables business-to-business or inter-enterprise telepresence usage—effectively expanding the number of addressable telepresence suites for an enterprise and driving more utility out of investments in visual collaboration infrastructure and services. The demonstration by Cisco, AT&T, BT, and Tata Communications is a great first step; ultimately the telepresence infrastructure vendors and carriers need to demonstrate telepresence over multiple networks with connections different third-party telepresence systems – that’s interoperability.
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