When Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior delivered her VoiceCon keynote Tuesday morning, much of her focus was on the future of collaboration. Cisco's VoiceCon announcements follow the same theme.One of the most intriguing developments in recent years has been the branching-out of the Cisco TelePresence solution, from a single, pretty rigidly-defined and executed specialized-conference-room setup, to a variety of contexts that still skew toward the high end of their target market, but whose continuing evolution shows that Cisco really does see immersive video as being an element that will transform the way people collaborate across distances.
In the latest announcement, Cisco came out with four new TelePresence applications. The first two continue Cisco's trend of taking TelePresence down-market somewhat, to smaller implementations and sites:
* TelePresence System 1300 Series--Now in addition to the original three-screen/three-camera TelePresence, this system continues to use three cameras but displays on a single 65-inch high-definition screen, and can be deployed in an existing conference room, as opposed to a completely decked-out TelePresence room.
* TelePresence Extended Reach--This format delivers TelePresence on WAN links as low as T1 or 1.5 Mbps, with lower 720p resolution as the tradeoff.
Together, these announcements show that Cisco is making a play for the videoconferencing market beyond the classic TelePresence setup. Cisco clearly sees that the opportunity is there for high-definition videoconferencing to expand to more office settings, and no longer pushes the original TelePresence vision as the only way to get an immersive experience. This makes sense; as customers grow more comfortable with high-definition videoconferencing, they may not need all the visual cues to be enacted in their surroundings.
I was talking with John Bartlett of NetForecast here at the show. John's one of our No Jitter bloggers, and he co-created our Video conference within a conference at VoiceCon Orlando 2009. John's got an interesting take on Telepresence. He said that no matter what type of communications we engage in, we always need to take into account our surroundings. When communications meant only the telephone, the environmental factors could be more easily controlled for, because the earpiece was right at your ear, and the mouthpiece right at your mouth. We shouldn't be surprised, John told me, that when you're going for an immersive video experience, you need to control for the environmentals that create your sense of immersion.
And yet, just as we trained ourselves to communicate on the phone, adjusting for the variations in quality of connections and types of devices, I think the same thing will occur with video. Assuming that high-definition is the baseline, i.e., the "toll quality" we'll come to expect for video communications, we may be able to use scaled-down variations on immersion, of the type Cisco is starting to roll out.
And think about Padmasree Warrior's keynote demo, which featured a TelePresence kiosk optimized for medical use. High definition is certainly important in an application like that, but "immersion" doesn't mean feeling like you're in the same room as much as it means that the doctor believes he or she is clearly seeing and receiving the information about the patient's condition that helps the doctor make accurate judgments about how to treat the patient.
Cisco's other two new TelePresence applications, TelePresence Recording Studio and TelePresence Event Controls, give enterprises capabilities for capturing and managing TelePresence sessions more effectively. That also helps bring TelePresence to more users and makes it more useful.
