I've already written here before about telepresence. It is a great set of technologies, but there's this nagging issue of ROI. In that I mean the return on investment made by the purchaser, not the seller of course.ROI is a very difficult thing to calculate, especially with this kind of technology. But a recent tweet I came by the other day by Marshall Eubanks, which offered some statistics regarding Cisco's internal use of Telepresence helped me to shed some light on this issue:
So...
Now it's great to see that they eat their own dog food, but with a price tag of over a $100,000 USD a room...that's...well...some expensive dog food.
And remember that they also take up floor space--a telepresence "suite" is a large conference room gone to waste--it's unusable for other types of meetings due to the nature of the room's furniture.
Want Better ROI? Connect, connect, connect! In order to get a better ROI, the video conferencing infrastructure has to be more accessible to a lot more people--allowing them to connect to the regular, non-telepresence conference rooms and from a desktop client, etc.
The real value of a video conference is allowing it to be a hybrid conference--one where people select how they want to join, without being forced into this or that room. They may choose the conference room if that's what they need--but they can also use other systems as well.
If I were a company considering a telepresence solution, I'd do the math--with the same amount of money I might be better off with several additional "smaller" room system solutions and a software client deployment that can connect to them. The ROI will be a lot better and most probably so will be the usage rates. And if you need telepresence--just make sure it connects to the rest of the video infrastructure you have.
Oh, and if you want to know how this is really done, just check out Sagee Ben-Zedeff's post about a real case study of a visual communications deployment that really works.
