TelePresence Phases of Deployment

As TelePresence technologies evolve, so too will the complexity of deployment solutions. Therefore, customers will likely approach their TelePresence deployments in phases, with the main phases of deployment as follows:

• Phase 1. Intracampus/Intra-enterprise deployments: Most enterprise customers will likely begin their TelePresence rollouts by provisioning (point-to-point) intra-enterprise TelePresence deployments. View this model as the basic TelePresence building block on which you can add more complex models.
• Phase 2. Intra-enterprise multipoint deployments: Because collaboration requirements might not always be facilitated with point-to-point models, the next logical phase of TelePresence deployment is to introduce multipoint resources to the intra-enterprise deployment model. Phases 1 and 2 might at times be undertaken simultaneously.
• Phase 3. Intercompany deployments: To expand the application and business benefits of TelePresence meetings to include external (customer- or partner-facing) meetings, an intercompany deployment model can be subsequently overlaid over either point-to-point or multipoint intra-enterprise deployments.
• Phase 4. TelePresence to the executive home: Because of the high executive-perk appeal of TelePresence and the availability of high-speed residential bandwidth options (such as fiber to the home), some executives might benefit greatly from deploying TelePresence units to their residences. Technically, this is simply an extension of the intra-enterprise model but might also be viewed as a separate phase because of the unique provisioning and security requirements posed by such residential TelePresence deployments, as illustrated in Figure 1.
  
  
  
   
  Figure 1: TelePresence to the executive home (an extension of the intra-enterprise deployment model)