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Chambers and Telepresence

John Chambers made some big promises for telepresence today, asserting (actually, Cisco's Marthin DeBeer is quoted) that Cisco will be on an annual run rate of $1 billion in Telepresence sales by the end of next year, and that it has 200 Telepresence customers and 1,000 systems on order.

John Chambers made some big promises for telepresence today, asserting (actually, Cisco's Marthin DeBeer is quoted) that Cisco will be on an annual run rate of $1 billion in Telepresence sales by the end of next year, and that it has 200 Telepresence customers and 1,000 systems on order.I might also point out this snippet from the Bloomberg account of Chambers' call today: "Businesses will respond to Cisco's TelePresence videoconferencing system, which costs as much as $299,000, in the same way that consumers reacted to Apple Inc.'s iPhone, boosting sales, Chambers said." I made a similar point on my Information Week blog a few weeks back ("The telepresence room may well be the Apple interface writ large: It's just cool, and it makes people go, 'Ooooh' and 'Aaaah.' Technologists discount this factor at their peril.")

Certainly telepresence will also drive bandwidth demand, which will help Cisco regain that 12%-17% growth rate that Chambers promised today. I do think you have to take it with a grain of salt when they point out that half of the bandwidth that Cisco uses is consumed by Telepresence; of course they're using the heck out of Telepresence, they're supposed to. If they're not, why would anyone else be?

As for the "why" of telepresence (whether Cisco's or anyone else's): I know it's not really supposed to be about travel avoidance, but I have just this one anecdote, for whatever it's worth.

I had the incredible good luck to discover that a childhood friend of mine happened to be on the same flight to New York today as I was. He's a top executive at a really big company. We talked about all the stuff you talk about, and in describing the kinds of things I write about, I mentioned telepresence, and he said his company was installing a system right about now. He immediately started talking, unprompted, about how he hates to travel, and how it'd be great to use the system to travel less.

You could look at this either way: He'd love to travel less; but there he and I were on a plane to New York on a Tuesday morning. If telepresence isn't the answer for travel avoidance, that doesn't mean the search won't go on to find a technology that is.