Cisco last Thursday gave journalists a preview of Telepresence, announcing two systems -- the Telepresence 1000 and Telepresence 3000 -- priced at US$79,000 and US$299,000, respectively.
During the video conference between Cisco's offices here and Hong Kong, Cisco announced at least five customers Telepresence, most of them telecommunications service providers and one multinational insurance company.
Cisco itself is deploying Telepresence and aims to install it in at least locations by the end of its fiscal year 2007. In Asia Pacific, it has Telepresence running in Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo and expects to install it in at least three more cities in the next two months.
By using Telepresence, Cisco aims to cut down its internal travel expenses by 20 percent and reduce overall operational expenses by at least US$100 million.
'We are studying our own adoption patterns and documenting the results along the way to draw up best practices in using a system such as Telepresence,' said Chuck Trent, Cisco's chief information officer for Asia Pacific.
The Telepresence 3000 system includes three 65-inch plasma TV screens (one for Telepresence 1000) capable of handling virtual meetings for up to twelve people.
According to Cisco, Telepresence is the only videoconferencing solution that supports the ultra-high definition standard 1080p. Videoconferencing equipment maker Polycom Inc. is set to introduce new products that support 720p resolution.
The Telepresence kit also includes an echo-canceling microphone, an HD camera that supports H.264 compression, a coder/decoder device powered by 70 dual-core digital signal processors (DSPs).
'We are looking at two general business strategies; one is to sell Telepresence to enterprise users ideally with points of presence in different parts of the world and two, service providers can offer it as a manage service for end-users,' said Guido Jouret, chief technology officer for Cisco's Emerging Markets Technology group.
Trent, however, acknowledged bandwidth consistency issues in locations that would be connected by Telepresence. Connectivity in the Philippines, for example, may not be as reliable if connected to Singapore via videoconferencing, which can bring about latency issues.
'Enterprise users need to figure out the QoS (quality of service) from local service providers,' he said. 'It boils down to making a business decision on allotting how much bandwidth to which applications including Telepresence.'