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.