telepresence

Videoconferencing consolidation continues: Logitech buys LifeSize

Lost in the hoopla from last week’s news that HP bought 3Com was a much smaller deal in the high definition (HD) videoconferencing market. PC accessory company Logitech has bought LifeSize Communicaitons, a six-year-old vendor of HD desktop videoconferencing and room-based telepresence products for $405 million.

Logitech is best known as a manufacturer of peripheral devices for PCs, especially keyboards and mice. With only a line of standard-definition webcams, Logitech’s specialty is not enterprise video.

With LifeSize, Logitech graduates from selling peripheral devices to consumers and small businesses to selling an enterprise solution. It’s a whole different ballgame. In addition to endpoint devices, LifeSize sells HD videoconferencing infrastructure, such as multipoint control units (MCUs), gateways and security devices.

In the wake of Cisco’s attempt to acquire Tandberg (a deal which might be collapsing), LifeSize probably recognized that competing in the enterprise video market will require the backing of a larger corporate partner.  Logitech might have the money to boost LifeSize’s marketing budget, but it doesn’t bring the right sales channel to the table.

The most logical next step for Logitech will be to approach key unified communications competitors to Cisco like Avaya, Siemens and Microsoft to build up video interoperability partnerships.

Tandberg shareholders to Cisco: Put a bigger diamond on that ring

Cisco’s deal to buy Tandberg could be on ice.

When Cisco and Tandberg agreed to their video marriage two weeks ago, the dowry was set at $3 billion. And the deal was contingent upon the approval of the owners of 90% of Tandberg’s stock.

According to Reuters (via GigaOm), Swedish brokerage SEB Enskilda has told Cisco that it represents 21 shareholders who own 24% of Tandberg’s stock, and those shareholders want more money.  “We think the price is too low,” Amund Lunde told Reuters. Lunde is CEO of life insurance firm Oslo Pensjonsforsikring, which owns 1% of Tandberg, It’s not clear what it would take to win over these holdouts, but clearly Cisco will have to dig deeper to get a controlling interest in the company.

Apparently investors have been telling the Norwegian press that something stinks about the Tandberg deal. According to the Financial Times (via Norwegian language site Dagen IT) Rasmussen Group CEO Rune Selmar said Cisco’s promise of three-year bonus agreements to “key” Tandberg employees “probably explains part of management’s positive attitude to the acquisition.”

Ouch. That sounds awfully close to an ugly accusation.

Cisco products: Making life easier on Fox’s 24 and helping Jack Bauer save lives

For seven seasons, Jack Bauer has rid the world of hundreds of terrorists, multiple nuclear bombs, and biological threats on Fox’s hit show 24. He didn’t do it alone — he had a trusty team of support, including Chloe on tech support, and Tony and Bill on tactical support. However, there was another key element to Jack’s success — Cisco WebEx, Cisco TelePresence and Cisco Unified Communications, as well as other Cisco products. Cisco sponsored this season and the past few seasons, and you could even get glimpses of the technology as they played integral parts of the plot lines.

For example, when President Allison Taylor (yet another reason I love this show — seasons ago, they debuted David Palmer as the first black president, and now Allison Taylor as the first woman president, who far out-acts Geena Davis from Commander in Chief) signs an executive pardon for a seemingly trustworthy source, she uses Cisco WebEx to electronically transfer her signature. An impending attack was taking place in DC, and he was the only person near the missiles who could help them, but he had a small window of opportunity. Time was of the essence, and the electronic signature was the best way to save time. Thanks to the product placement from Cisco, and a ringing endorsement from the head FBI agent (”We’ve already…set it up via WebEx, it’ll be able to give us a secure digital signature,” Agent Moss says), she was able to get her signature on the pardon to the source immediately and allow for the mission to take place.

When the acting heads of the group responsible for the day’s terrorist attacks decide to “meet” and discuss the next course of action after their plans had been foiled, they use a fancy UC product to do so, which allowed for roundtable discussion with private messaging and a button that allowed them “raise their hands,” but it also allowed for their anonymity with voice disguisers and a blank avatar per user (A driving part of the plot was that the group responsible for the attacks was unaware of each others’ identities, knowing only that they had the same vested interest in attacking American targets.). The UC product also allowed for document transfer among the members of the call. While Cisco was heavily shown in other scenes, I could not find any trace of a Cisco trademark in this scene — perhaps they don’t want to be associated with terrorists.

Then, in the season finale, a three-screen Cisco TelePresence setup allowed the Attorney General to question the President’s daughter and acting chief-of-staff, Olivia Taylor, about her role in the death of Jonas Hodges, who was suspected of treason and killed while in FBI custody. TelePresence allowed the AG, along with two other Justice Department agents, to interview Olivia with each person on a separate screen, and a safe network to make sure no hackers would get any of Olivia’s testimony. With clear detail in each person’s face, it would be more difficult to lie about a question, as she had three people watching her body language. It also allowed the AG to upload phone records and documents to Olivia, who was stowed away at the White House after the day’s events (including a siege at the White House and a DC biological weapon bomb scare), so she could verify them remotely and securely during the call without leaving the White House or setting up a separate secure line. Of course, it was all for naught, as Olivia later crumbled and fessed up to hiring someone to kill Hodges.

You can see all of these clips and more from past seasons on the Cisco website. Who knows how Cisco TelePresence or Cisco WebEx will aid Jack Bauer during season eight of 24, as he takes on a whole new set of technologically savvy terrorists?

Swine flu: yet another justification for telepresence investment

John E. Burke, principal analyst over at Nemertes Research has an interesting take on the swine flu hysteria.  It’s just another reason why companies should invest in telepresence technologies from Cisco, Tandberg, Polycom, HP et al.

Burke noted in an email from Nemertes that the flu outbreak in Mexico has prompted executives from Japanese companies like Sony and Sharp to cancel trips to their Mexican production facilities. He said telepresence would be a viable way for these executives to keep their face-to-face meetings with Mexican staff.

Vendors have so far focused their business cases for telepresence on the reduction of travel expenses, green initiatives and increased productivity. But clearly telepresence can also factor into business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

Extending that a bit further, desktop video should also get some attention thanks to swine flu. If a pandemic does indeed strike, many people would appreciate the option of working from home while the virus runs its course over the course of weeks or months.

Tandberg telepresence now interoperates with Polycom telepresence

Tandberg announced this morning that its telepresence technology is now interoperable with the telepresence technology of its rival Polycom. The interoperability is delivered as a software upgrade to the Tandberg Telepresence Server.

Tandberg’s server already enables interoperability with non-telepresence Tandberg video endpoints and with Microsoft Office Communications Server. However, until now, the vast majority of immersive telepresence systems on the market have been extremely proprietary. Telepresence systems are generally unable to maintain the immersive, multi-screen, high-definition experience they are known for when a session is transmitted across vendors. In many cases telepesence systems from different vendors can’t communciate with each other at all.

The new interoperability from Tandberg claims to deliver that telepresence quality to sessions between Tandberg and Polycom products. This ineroperability will be especially important to inter-enterprise communications, enabling Tandberg customers to communicate and collaborate with Polycom customers.

There is no word on whether Tandberg will add interoperability with its other major telepresence rival, Cisco, but in this announcement the company said it will “continue to build on its successes by working to develop immersive interoperability with additional telepresence systems – both proprietary and standards-based.”

Microsoft decides it shouldn’t be in the video conference phone business

When Microsoft introduced its Roundtable phone 2007, it was pretty clear to me that they had a cool device on their hands. The phone has a ring of video cameras on a small turret. It is meant ti sit in a conference room, where it offers a 360-degree view of meeting participants. The phone uses directional technology to cut in real-time to whoever is speaking in a meeting.

I shot this demo of the phone at the Microsoft booth at VoiceCon Orlando 2008.

The only aspect of the Roundtable phone that troubled me was Microsoft.  It’s a software company, not a hardware company. It does Windows and lets others build the PCs. It does Windows Mobile and lets others do the smartphone. And when Microsoft does venture into hardware, it tends to do it in the consumer market, and with mixed results (see Zune, XBox).  So it wasn’t clear to me why Microsoft was trying to get into this business.

Granted, the Roundtable integrates with Office Communications Server, but every phone equipment vendor under the sun is looking to integrate with OCS these days. Walk the exhibitor’s hall at this year’s VoiceCon and see that for yourself.

Apparently Microsoft agrees that it’s not the ideal vendor for a product like Roundtable. It announced at VoiceCon this week that it is transferring the Roundtable phone to Polycom, which will become the sole distributor of the device. Polycom is re-branding Roundtable as the CX5000, which integrates it into Polycom’s existing line of conference phone products. Microsoft will continue to manufacture the device, but as far as I can tell, this phone is now going to market as a Polycom product. Microsoft will continue to support customers who bought the device through it, but all subsequent support will be provided by Polycom.

According to Tim Yankey, director of voice product marketing at Polycom, said Microsoft will stop selling Roundtable on April 13 and hand over sales, marketing and distribution to Polycom. The sales price under Polycom will be $4300.

Although Microsoft will continue to manufacture the device, Yankey told me that Polycom has the right to make changes and additions to the phone in the future.

Polycom also announced at VoiceCon that it will begin offering 1080p and 720p resolution in its high definition telepresence systems. This is the broadcast quality video that competitors such as Tandberg and Cisco already offer in their telepresence systems.

VoiceCon Cisco Keynote: Cisco goes vertical

During her keynote this morning, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior emphasized the importance of collaboration in enterprise communications, with technologies that allow users to work in the way that they want to. In this vein, she talked about the importance of delivering a consistent user experience regardless of the endpoint device.

She also noted that her boss, CEO John Chambers, likes to communicate through video while her preferred modes of communication are microblogging services like Twitter. She said enterprise IT organizations should be prepared to support these multiple working styles by treating the network as a platform for delivering services. She noted said that companies should be focusing on Quality of Experience (QoE) in addition to Quality of Service (QoS).

Warrior and Cisco executive Sean Curtis demonstrated a vertical-market Telepresence system designed for healthcare, with cameras tailored for ear, nose and throat examination, blood pressure monitors, etc. Curtis showed how the technology could allow a doctor in China to treat him for back pain, even providing him with a recorded Telepresence session with instructions on how he should take an herbal remedy.

While this was happening, I noticed that IDC research director Abner Germanow was Twittering about how he is seeing a lot of healthcare applications from vendors on VoiceCon’s showroom floor.  Clearly vendors have identified healthcare as a vertical that will continue spending on communications technology in this economy.

Meanwhile, Abner’s colleague at IDC, Nora Freedman Tweet on Cisco’s demo captured perfectly what I was thinking about this healthcare Telepresence demo: “Keynote demo of health telepresence emphasizes need/relevancy of industry specific solutions.”

Telepresence will kill airline profits

I don’t know how this escaped my attention last month but Gartner predicted that video telepresence will take away $3.5 billion in revenue from the airline industry by 2012. That’s got to make executives at Delta and US Air wince.

As part of its top 10 predictions for 2009, Gartner predicted that telepresence would replace 2.1 million airline seats per year by 2012. In making this prediction, Gartner declined to estimate how much telepresence is costing airlines today.

Given how ruinous telepresence promises to be for the airline industry, I’m left wondering if the Deltas and US Airs of the world are investing in telepresence themselves. Will executives at airlines try to save money by holding high level meetings via telepresence, or will they stubbornly refuse to adopt this technology and continue to fly to on-site meetings in some symbolic effort to support the business.

Another interesting prediction from Gartner: By the end of 2013, 40% of enterprise knowledge workers will have abandoned or removed their desk phones.  This certainly applies to me. I’d be happy to throw my desk phone in the trash if my employer agreed to subsidize part of the service plan for my iPhone.  As it is, I work from home twice a week, and on those days my iPhone is my only means of telephony.

Hat Tip to John Willis