The Cisco TelePresence Solution

Cisco TelePresence solution was officially released in December 2006, providing the first true replacement for face-to-face meetings. Prior to its release, a number of telepresence systems, from numerous vendors, were available on the market; however, their adoption was limited to a small number of customers, with just a few systems each. These systems required overlay networks and focused on white-glove service for executive users. Cisco focused on providing an exceptional experience but also realized that scheduling and ease of use was the key to providing a solution that would be deployed on existing IP networks and used by all employees. For years the video conferencing industry struggled to gain mass adoption and acceptable utilization rates, and in many cases the issue was related to ease of use and system reliability.

Early Telepresence vendors offered systems providing a good overall experience while addressing reliability issues found in existing video conferencing systems. Unfortunately, these offerings were based on managed service models requiring dedicated networks, and in many cases, custom rooms to house Telepresence endpoints. These systems were not only expensive but also carried a high monthly cost associated with the dedicated bandwidth and managed service fees. In some cases, solutions required an operator to do everything from starting the meeting to enabling data sharing. This model provided a high-end niche Telepresence market but did not allow Telepresence to reach its full potential. For Telepresence to realize its full potential, it needed to extend past the boardroom and into the mainstream.

Cisco focused on delivering a Telepresence solution that provided an immersive true in-person experience, used by all employees, scheduled by the employees, providing tools commonly used in face-to-face meetings, and, most important, run over existing IP networks. At the time of its release, Cisco TelePresence was the only Telepresence system on the market that did not require a dedicated network.

Instead of providing dedicated bandwidth that couldn’t be used by other applications when TelePresence wasn’t being used, Cisco focused on converged IP networks. This allowed enterprise customers to deploy Cisco TelePresence over their existing infrastructure, realizing the upside and long-term value of a converged IP network. However, in some cases customer networks were not ready for an application such as TelePresence. This required some enterprise customers to temporarily deploy Cisco TelePresence over a parallel network until changes were made enabling the TelePresence system to be moved to the customers’ converged IP network.

The initial Cisco TelePresence product release consisted of two TelePresence systems:

§  A conference room-based TelePresence system (CTS-3000) supporting up to six participants at each location

§  A small meeting room system (CTS-1000) supporting up to two participants at each location

The solution also included a middleware scheduling platform—Cisco TelePresence Manager (CTS-Manager)—providing integration with Microsoft Exchange and a simple dialing interface known as One Button to Push. The initial launch of Cisco TelePresence was an immediate success, with most systems deployed for use by CXO level executives. However, it quickly became evident that additional products and functionality were required to meet customer needs.

Shortly after its initial release, additional products and functionality were introduced. Multipoint support was added, enabling meetings with three or more TelePresence systems. Additionally, two new TelePresence systems were announced in early 2008:

§  <The CTS-3200, supporting up to 18 participants for large meeting rooms, was delivered in mid-2008.

§  The CTS-500, supporting a single user for the executive or home office, was delivered shortly after the CTS-3200.

With the addition of these two new systems, Cisco TelePresence broadened its market at the high end, with the CTS-3200, while allowing greater system access to the masses with the CTS-500. Figure 1 illustrates the components of the Cisco TelePresence solution.

Figure 1: Cisco TelePresence

Along with all product and feature enhancements, a Cisco TelePresence Inter-Company offering was announced in late 2007, expanding the reach and extending the relevance of Cisco TelePresence. The addition of Inter-Company allowed customers to extend the benefits of Cisco TelePresence beyond their own enterprises. Enterprises now have the capability to meet virtually with any partner or customer at any time, saving money and improving productivity.

With the expansion of the Cisco TelePresence portfolio and the addition of Inter-Company, Cisco TelePresence adoption continues to grow at an amazing rate.

How Is TelePresence Different Than Video Conferencing?

Both video conferencing and telepresence applications are designed to provide virtual meetings. However, there are fundamental differences in the overall technology and meeting experience delivered by each application. As mentioned in the preceding sections, the lines between video conferencing and telepresence have been blurred as the market focus on telepresence has intensified. Many vendors are now categorizing any video conferencing unit that supports high-definition video as a telepresence product.


Some argue that a high-definition video conferencing system can be made to produce a telepresence experience, and in fact some video conferencing vendors are utilizing existing high-definition codecs in their telepresence systems today. However, telepresence is a set of technologies, including video and audio, that provides an experience enabling all users to feel as if they are in the same room, an experience that not all high-definition video conferencing systems truly provide.


A number of distinctions are often made between the two technologies. The following three guiding principals for Cisco TelePresence are used to show the differences between the two technologies:


Quality
Few will debate the quality of experience found in Cisco TelePresence systems. Cisco TelePresence systems are designed with every detail in mind, from the video and audio quality, to the furniture included in some larger Telepresence systems. High-quality video is required to produce an “in-person” experience. Cisco TelePresence systems use specialized cameras that are strategically placed above system displays, providing optimal eye contact for all meeting participants. Cisco TelePresence cameras are also fixed focus and tuned for the room environment, allowing consistent images across all sites. Cisco TelePresence systems also provide large integrated displays providing vivid, lifelike images in high-definition quality. Audio systems provide crisp, lifelike audio, using wideband codecs. Audio systems are specially engineered for the TelePresence system, room dimensions, and table layouts, providing multichannel audio tuned for voice frequencies and eliminating off-screen audio sources. Microphones and speakers are strategically placed, providing immersive audio that emanates from the speakers location in the room. Cisco TelePresence systems also provide room requirements outlining lighting, acoustic requirements, and in some cases integrated furniture. All these factors contribute to the quality level that is required for any Cisco TelePresence system. Telepresence is the sum of all these attributes. If any one of these areas is overlooked, the result will not be a true telepresence experience.


Today’s video conferencing systems have the capability to provide good audio and video quality with many systems supporting high-definition video and wide-band audio. However, video conferencing systems were built for flexibility and adaptability. Video conferencing systems are shipped with pan-tilt-zoom cameras that are designed to capture large rooms with long tables accommodating all participants on a single display. Most video conferencing systems ship with displays that range in size and can even be replaced with larger displays or projector systems for large rooms. Advanced audio codecs have been developed by a few of the video conferencing vendors that provide excellent audio quality. Most video conferencing systems are shipped with tabletop microphones that are often deployed in smaller conference rooms and routinely replaced by in-house microphone systems for large meeting rooms. Video conferencing systems are deployed in many different room environments from the high-end executive board rooms to the small meeting room with a video conferencing system on a cart. Unfortunately, video conferencing units on carts far outnumber high-end video conferencing rooms, resulting in highly variable, inconsistent experiences from one room to the other.


Simplicity
The complexity and inconsistency of the various user interface provided by existing video conferencing systems is one of the biggest reasons for the low utilization rates found in most video conference deployments. Video conferencing systems ship with remote controls that are used to initiate meetings, focus cameras, share documents, and more. These remote controls have frustrated users for years and are often replaced with customized touch panels. However, customized touch panels are usually only deployed in high-end rooms, whereas smaller rooms use vendor-supplied remote controls, making it difficult for the average user to navigate different and complicated interfaces. Many companies find it necessary to employ a dedicated video conference staff tasked with scheduling, initiating, and managing meetings to address the complexity found in video conferencing systems.


Telepresence systems are designed with simplified user interfaces and in some cases, such as with the Cisco TelePresence system, a simple (IP Phone) interface that is used for all systems. As mentioned earlier, some vendors have developed new telepresence systems while at the same time branding existing high-definition video conferencing systems as telepresence systems. This will continue to provide challenges for users that experience the simplified user interface of a telepresence system one day and a complicated remote control found in smaller room the next. For telepresence to reach its full potential, the user interface must continue to be simplified and remain consistent, ensuring any user is comfortable running a telepresence meeting.


Telepresence systems are often described as inflexible and lacking many features found in video conferencing systems. This is by design, removing unnecessary features to simplify the overall user experience. The more features added into a system, the more complicated the system becomes. Early telepresence systems provided only the basic features required for business meetings, but as customer adoption grew, the demand for more features followed. This provides a challenge for all telepresence vendors; how to keep systems simple and intuitive while adding new and advanced feature sets. In reality, many features that are never used, or are only used by a small number of customers, are implemented across all technologies, ultimately complicating implementations and usability. The “less is more model” has proved successful for Cisco TelePresence to date, but time will tell how long this philosophy will last in the face of customer demand for more and more features.


Reliability
System reliability has been a perceived issue with video conferencing systems for years. In reality, the video conferencing systems themselves are fairly reliable. However, outside factors have plagued them for years. The complexity of the video conferencing user interface played a big part in the perceived reliability issue. Users often walked into rooms, misdialed or pressed the wrong button on the custom touch screen panel, the call failed to connect, and the user assumed there was an issue with the system. It was just as common for a user to walk into a room and try to use the system only to find out the display was powered off or had been disconnected from the video codec. This was often the case in the Cisco internal video conferencing deployment. Displays were often used for different purposes, or someone needed to use the network jack and reconnected the system to the wrong jack. Whatever the reason, users quickly abandon the use of video conferencing systems when they encounter issues initiating calls.


Cisco TelePresence systems have made it a priority to provide systems that work every time. As described previously, Cisco TelePresence systems have simplified the dialing interface to address issues with user error and integrated all components to eliminate these types of avoidable issues. System displays, and even lighting on some systems, are centrally controlled by the TelePresence system, ensuring that every time a user pushes the button to connect the TelePresence call, it works. Single screen TelePresence systems are often mounted to walls with network and power jacks located behind the system, so users don’t have the ability to unplug power or network connections. The importance of integrated system displays is often overlooked for single screen systems. Something as small as an input setting being changed can cause a call to fail and the system to be deemed unreliable.


Integrating all system components also provides enhanced manageability, allowing systems to report issues for any system component that might cause call failures. Considering early Telepresence systems were primarily used by CXO-level executives, it was imperative that any system failure be identified as quickly as possible. As Telepresence systems have moved into the mainstream, this manageability has proven invaluable.


Bandwidth Requirements
Network requirements for video conferencing and Telepresence are often mis-stated. How many times have you heard, “Telepresence requires a lot more bandwidth than video conferencing”? A high-definition video conferencing system requires the same, or in some cases more, bandwidth than a Cisco TelePresence system, running the same video resolution, to provide a comparable image quality. Cisco TelePresence systems have implemented advanced standards-based compression algorithms, lowering overall bandwidth consumption. These advanced compression algorithms have allowed Cisco TelePresence systems to provide 1080p video resolution at, close to, the same bandwidth consumption of video conferencing systems running 720p video resolution.


Most video conferencing systems enable lower resolutions that require much less bandwidth; however, video conferencing systems running at 720p resolution consume between 2 Mbps to 4 Mbps, whereas single screen Cisco TelePresence systems running at the same resolution only require 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps. Remember that some TelePresence systems have three video displays. Comparing the network requirements of a single-screen video conferencing system to a multiscreen TelePresence system is not comparing apples-to-apples. Video conferencing systems should be compared to single screen TelePresence systems.

Cisco Telepresence

Rather than starting off with a set of technologies and then figuring out what it could build, Cisco took the opposite approach. Cisco decided that the time was right for telepresence, but rather than integrating off-the-shelf components, Cisco decided to build the system from the ground up. Taking a blank sheet of paper, a small group of engineers and executives at Cisco with many years of experience in video conferencing, IP Telephony, video and audio codec technology, and networking gathered together to define a set of requirements that would become the tenets used to design and build the Cisco TelePresence solution.


The first guiding principle of Cisco TelePresence was that the experience was paramount. It demanded an experience that was so lifelike and realistic that users would literally forget that they weren’t actually in the same room together. Cisco was so captivated by this idea, it created the mantra, “It’s All About the Experience,” and posted this mantra all over the hallways of the building it worked in. If the technology could not be made to deliver this level of quality at a reasonable price and bandwidth rate, then forget it, it wouldn’t build it.


The second guiding principle was that the system had to be so incredibly easy to schedule and use that literally anyone could do it. It had to completely do away with all the complicated user interfaces, remote controls, and dialing schemes of traditional video conferencing and would not require a help desk technician or a technically savvy user to set up and create a meeting. In fact, it made a conscious effort to purposely avoid adding in a lot of features, buttons, and nerd-knobs that video conferencing systems have, and focused on simplicity so dramatically that it reduced the entire user experience of initiating a Cisco TelePresence meeting down to a single button, which it coined, “One Button to Push.”


The third guiding principle was that the solution had to be utterly reliable. It had to work every single time, time after time after time. Only then would users trust it enough to actually use it; in fact, they would come to rely upon it, which in turn would drive high usage levels and deliver a true return on investment.


These three guiding principles, Quality, Simplicity, and Reliability, became the foundation from which all other design requirements would be based. From there, the team embarked on a journey to go and build, from the ground up, an experience that would deliver those attributes.


Although a great deal of the solution was designed and built from the ground up, including the 1080p multistream codec technology, audio subsystem, cameras, displays, and even the furniture. Cisco also had the benefit of leveraging much of the technology and standards it had used for IP Telephony, which at the time was redefined as Unified Communications. For example, Cisco TelePresence leveraged and reused the Cisco Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) stack and Cisco CallManager (now known as Unified Communications Manager) as its call control platform. It reused the 802.3af Power over Ethernet technology used by Cisco IP Phones to power its cameras. It reused the 802.1Q/p Automatic VLAN and quality of service (QoS) framework for attaching to the access layer of the LAN. It reused the same Cisco Media Convergence Server MCS-7800 series server platforms and Cisco Linux Voice Operating System used to run many of the voice server applications such as Cisco CallManager, Cisco Unity, and many others. It even reused the Cisco 7900 Series IP Phones, which serve as the user interface to the Cisco TelePresence system. By taking this approach, Cisco provided a solution that in many ways behaved just like an IP Phone on the network, allowing customers who had already invested in Cisco Unified Communications to see Cisco TelePresence as “just another type of endpoint” on that existing platform. Furthermore, by taking this approach, Cisco TelePresence was built upon an already proven platform, allowing Cisco TelePresence to achieve something that no other product in the history Cisco has ever done; release 1.0 was rock-solid stable, right out of the starting gate.


The other thing that differentiated Cisco TelePresence from other ventures in the history of Cisco was that with TelePresence, Cisco was not content to just offer the endpoints and let someone else provide the backend components, or just offer the network infrastructure and let other vendors provide the endpoints and backend components. Cisco decided that for Cisco TelePresence to be successful, it had to provide a complete, end-to-end solution: endpoints, multipoint, scheduling and management, call control, and network infrastructure. Furthermore, Cisco did not want to just sell the hardware and software and leave it up to the customers to figure out how to deploy it and manage it successfully. The product offering would need to be backed by a suite of Planning, Design, and Implementation (PDI) services, day-2 support and monitoring services.


Cisco also knew that the only way to prove to the market that telepresence was truly a new category of technology that could finally deliver on the promise of increasing productivity and reducing travel costs was to immediately deploy large numbers of TelePresence systems throughout Cisco, demonstrating that it could be done and that the Return on Investment (ROI) model was valid. Cisco took a bold step, slashing travel budgets globally and deploying more than 200 TelePresence systems in Cisco offices worldwide within the first 18 months of its first TelePresence shipment. This not only catapulted Cisco into the market leadership position in the number of TelePresence systems installed, but also made Cisco the largest user of telepresence in the world. At the time this book was written, Cisco had more than 350 production TelePresence systems installed internally, with more than 65,000 employees using them day in and day out. The average weekly utilization rate for these systems is more than 46 percent, with more than 4000 meetings conducted per month, an estimated savings of $174,000,000 in travel cost, and a total savings of 95,000 metric tons of carbon emissions to date. Furthermore, it is estimated that these numbers will dramatically increase with the deployment of personal TelePresence systems.


Cisco’s aggressive launch into the telepresence market caused a huge ground swell around telepresence. Cisco had always been viewed as an infrastructure company, and for the first time, Cisco was viewed as a video company. Many people questioned whether Cisco could make this move into high-end video communications and compete with existing video vendors, but Cisco has proven it can make this transition with a market-leading telepresence solution. The Cisco entrance into the telepresence market has prompted existing video conferencing vendors to develop telepresence solutions instead of continuing to focus strictly on high-definition video conferencing. Only time will tell where telepresence leads us, but it is off to an interesting beginning.

Evolution of Video Communications

Video conferencing has been around for more than four decades. In 1964, at the World’s Fair in New York, AT&T provided the world a preview of the first video conferencing endpoint, the AT&T Picturephone, illustrated in Figure 1. Six years later, AT&T released the Picturephone to consumers in downtown Pittsburgh, PA. Although the Picturephone ultimately failed to gain mass adoption because of its high price tag and the fact that users in 1970 weren’t ready for video phones in their homes, it exposed the world to the possibility of video communications that ultimately sparked interest and development of private video conferencing systems that debuted throughout the 1970s.

Figure 1: AT&T Picturephone

In 1982, Compression Labs introduced the first commercial group video conferencing system, the CLI T1, enabling video communications over leased-line T1 circuits at 1.544 Mbps. Even with its high price of ~$250,000 and $1000 per hour line costs, the CLI T1 once again sparked the interest in video communications, bringing additional vendors into the market. In 1986, PictureTel introduced its first video conferencing system with a price of ~$80,000 and $100 per hour line cost, dramatically reducing the price of the system and its operational cost. The rapid cost reductions, market adoption, and overall visibility accelerated the development of video standards and new product development.


Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, work on new video standards continued. In 1990, two standards emerged that would provide a basis for interoperability between various vendors’ video conferencing systems. H.320 provided a standard for running multimedia (audio/video/data) over ISDN networks, whereas H.261 provided a standard for video coding at low bit rates (40 kbps to 2 Mbps). With the release of these two standards, video conferencing as most of us know it today was born. Throughout the mid-1990s, H.320-based video conferencing systems were introduced to the market by a number of vendors. These standards enabled vendors to provide endpoints with lower cost of ownership, utilizing a public ISDN network, and providing interoperability with other vendors’ H.320 systems. The fact that a public network was now available for video conferencing meant the sky was the limit. Users could dial one another over a public network for the first time, providing the first opportunity for mass adoption.


In the mid-1990s, new protocols were released for video conferencing over analog telephone lines (H.324) and data conferencing (T.120). Along with these new protocols came enhancements to video coding with the introduction of the H.263 standard, which provided more efficient video coding and higher resolutions. About the same time, Internet Protocol (IP) networks (and specifically, Ethernet LANs) were starting to take hold. In 1996, the H.323 standard was released, which defined protocols used for providing multimedia over packet-based networks. With the release of H.323, the market saw a slew of low cost, IP-based, desktop video conferencing endpoints, such as Microsoft NetMeeting, PictureTel LiveLan, Intel ProShare, and several others. At the same time, traditional video conferencing vendors started to introduce H.323 support into their room and group systems.


It wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s that H.323 video conferencing started to pick up steam. Low-cost desktop video conferencing endpoints never took off like everyone expected, but the mid- to low-end group systems started to take hold. In 1999, Polycom introduced the ViewStation, as shown in Figure 1-2, offering a “set top box” style video conferencing unit that revolutionized the video conferencing market. Unlike its large, complex, and expensive predecessors, the ViewStation was compact, simple to set up, much easier to use, and much less expensive. Immediately, a large portion of the market started to shift from large expensive systems to the smaller lower-cost systems in hopes of outfitting more rooms and expanding the reach of video conferencing.

Figure 2: Polycom Viewstation

During the early and mid-2000s, the video conferencing market moved ahead slowly, never really fulfilling the expectations of analysts or vendors. Even with the availability of lower-cost, easier-to-deploy endpoints, video conferencing couldn’t break the trend. Every year seemed to be the year video would break out, but it never seemed to happen. Vendors made great strides in lowering the cost of systems and improving overall video quality, but the systems couldn’t seem to gain mass adoption. Even in companies like Cisco that deployed hundreds of these lower-cost systems, utilization remained low, in many cases below 10 percent. Users seemed intimidated by the custom touch panels or the remote controls used to initiate calls and control the systems. Users often complained about wasting half the meeting trying to get the video call connected due to the complicated remote control or custom touch screen interfaces. In many cases, companies deployed video systems from different vendors, further complicating the life of users by introducing different remote controls for each vendor system. Custom touch panels are a great alternative to remote controls, allowing complete control of the entire video conferencing room including lighting, audio, and full control of the system. However, the more devices the touch panels controlled, the more complicated the interface became, making it difficult for the average user to navigate. Even when users could get calls connected, the overall experience often provided little value-add to the meeting. Poorly designed rooms and small images of multiple people around large tables made it difficult to read body language and facial expressions. These two factors played a large roll in the low utilization of most video conferencing deployments.


During this period, Cisco was heavily involved in pushing H.323 video conferencing. Cisco entered into an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with RADVision providing the first Cisco H.323 video conferencing solution. These products included H.323 Multipoint Control Units (MCU), H.320/H.323 gateways, with an H.323 Gatekeeper and Proxy that ran within the Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS) on various Cisco router platforms. Cisco produced H.323 video conferencing deployment guides and assisted numerous customers in building out large-scale H.323 video conferencing networks. Despite its efforts, video conferencing continued to experience low user adoption rates. Cisco had recently introduced IP Telephony to the market in 1999 and was enjoying excellent market penetration in that arena and believed that the answer to making video conferencing ubiquitous was to make it “as easy to use as a phone call.” In 2004, Cisco introduced Video Telephony to the market, allowing customers to use their Cisco IP Phones as the user interface to make and receive video calls, simply by dialing the phone number of another user’s IP Phone. Intuitive telephony-like features were also included, such as putting the call on hold, transferring the call, and conferencing in a third participant. Hundreds of thousands of Cisco Video Telephony endpoints were deployed in the market, but despite its extreme ease-of-use and telephony-like user experience, usage rates for Video Telephony were only slightly better than that of existing video conferencing systems.


Also in the mid-2000s, the H.264 standard was created that provided even more-efficient encoding, enabling higher quality video at low-bit rates, and support for high-definition video (720p and 1080p) at higher bit rates (~ 2 Mbps and above). At the time this book was written, video conferencing vendors such as Polycom, Tandberg, LifeSize, and others had begun offering high-definition-capable endpoints, hoping that the improved image quality would breathe life back into the video conferencing market. It’s just now that high-definition video conferencing endpoints are deployed and used in good numbers, so only time will tell the fate of these next-generation video conferencing endpoints. At the same time, Microsoft, Cisco, and others began a renewed effort to push collaboration applications to the desktop, with applications such as Microsoft Office Communicator and Cisco Unified Personal Communicator.


As early as 2000, telepresence systems started to show up on the market, providing a more holistic approach to creating a virtual meeting experience than existing video conferencing systems. Rather than focus on providing a low-cost video conferencing experience, they focused on providing a high-quality, immersive experience, so people felt as if they were actually in the same room together. Using multiple screens and cameras, they divided the meeting room in half, positioning the screens, cameras, tables, and chairs in such a way as to mimic the feeling that everyone in the meeting was sitting at the same table. These early telepresence pioneers were small, privately owned companies serving a relatively small niche market.


In 2004, Hewlett-Packard was the first large, multinational vendor to bring an immersive telepresence system, immediate credibility, and increased focus to the telepresence market. The Halo Telepresence system offered a white glove service and targeted the executive meeting rooms. Rooms within a room were built to provide the proper environment, and a new dedicated Halo Exchange Video Network (HEVN) was introduced, providing a fully managed telepresence service. However, even with the backing of a major technology company, telepresence was still challenged with limited adoption and slow growth rates.
Early Telepresence systems were targeted at the executive ranks with an expensive high-touch model. Due to this executive level approach, vendors offered turnkey solutions and required a fully managed service over a dedicated network. This approach seemed like a good idea at the time because there were similar video conferencing solutions with the same model. However, the high system costs coupled with the high recurring fee for the managed service severely limited their deployment. Even though many customers’ networks were not ready for telepresence at the time, customers realized that providing separate networks for specific applications was not the right path in the long term.


In late 2006, Cisco entered the market with its first telepresence system focused on providing a truly immersive experience, deployable over existing IP networks and used by anyone within a company. Cisco leveraged its vast networking knowledge to design their TelePresence system to run over converged IP networks. At the same time, a grass roots effort was underway that would provide design guidance for service providers looking to offer Cisco TelePresence as a hosted or managed service. Additionally, this design guidance allowed service providers to offer an Inter-Company solution for Cisco TelePresence. This work also allowed Cisco TelePresence to extend past companies’ intranetwork boundaries for the first time, further broadening the power of Cisco TelePresence. Cisco TelePresence Inter-Company offerings continue to expand, providing even more momentum to Cisco TelePresence. As previously discussed, early telepresence systems were supported on overlay networks and managed by providers, which severely limited the proliferation of telepresence systems. Providing telepresence over converged IP networks requires systems that provide standard management tools, security, and a well-defined network architecture. Figure 3 shows the first Cisco TelePresence system: the CTS-3000.

Figure 3: Cisco TelePresence CTS-3000

What Is Telepresence?

Telepresence as a concept has been around for many years and can be applied to a large number of applications. From virtual dining-room applications in which people are made to feel that they are sharing a meal at the same table together, to mystical “beam me up, Scotty” scenarios, such as projecting a presenter onto a stage using holographic projection technologies so the presenter appears to be standing on stage in front of the audience. Any immersive application that makes one person feel as though another person is physically present in their environment with them can be called telepresence. Wikipedia.org defines telepresence as “a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance that they were present, or to have an effect, at a location other than their true location.” Although these types of applications are “cool,” their usefulness has so far been isolated to niche markets, one-off events, or to futuristic research studies.

However, there is one application in particular in which telepresence has found a viable market: the business meeting. In today’s global economic climate, companies are hungry for technologies that enable them to communicate with their customers, partners, and employees more frequently and more effectively. They want to speed their decision-making processes, allowing geographically separated groups to collaborate more effectively together on projects, increasing intimacy with their customers, and lowering their costs of doing business. Business travel is at an all-time high, yet traveling is expensive, time-consuming, and takes a toll on people’s bodies and personal lives.

However, the market is skeptical of video technologies that promise to deliver these benefits. For years the video conferencing industry has promised that it would replace the need for face-to-face meetings and lower travel costs, but for the vast majority of companies that have deployed it, video conferencing has for the most part failed to deliver on those promises. Video conferencing has struggled for years with complicated user interfaces, lack of integrated scheduling, and in many cases poor video quality. These issues have directly impacted overall utilization rates and caused major skepticism about the true value of video’s use as a communications tool.

Many people refer to telepresence as high-end video conferencing, or the “next generation” of video conferencing. Many people categorize any video conferencing system that provides high-definition video and wideband audio as telepresence, but in reality telepresence is its own unique video technology. Telepresence is much more than just high-definition video and wideband audio. Providing a true telepresence experience requires attention to details overlooked in most video conferencing environments. Later in this chapter, video conferencing and telepresence will be compared highlighting the difference in the two technologies.