Telepresence – A Solution to Rising T&E Costs for Corporations

Implications: With rising fuel costs and other travel related expenses, the need for a way to do business without having to get on an airplane is critical to corporate survival. Telepresence is an answer to doing business in a more cost effective manner.

Analysis: Nortel’s contract with Deloitte is a major event.  Deloitte LLP offers a variety of services using what the industry calls professionals (aka, consultants) to provide service in the areas of:

-    Auditing
-    Tax Management Consulting
-    Financial Advisory Consulting

Deloitte is a global business.  In order for Deloitte’s business to work it needs to be able to travel and communicate with clients globally.  The rising cost of fuel and other travel related expenses including lodging and food has made it increasingly difficult for firms like Deloitte to service clients with having to escalate their fees.  The solution is telepresence.

Telepresence is far better than a conference call and theoretically better than video conferencing.  Video conferencing is often associated with small video screens with a limited field of vision and poor visual quality.  In fact one of the reason why video conferencing failed years ago was because it did not feel like you were having a meeting or even a conference call.  Video conferencing felt like an exercise or plain hard work.

The short version description is that "telepresence is video conferencing plus".  Telepresence involves integrating a set of technologies in such a way that a person feels like they are actually in the same room as the person hundreds or thousands of miles away.  Telepresence technologies give the users the appearance and feeling that they are someplace else.

Telepresence requires the users to be literally immersed in the experience.  Typically a very large screen and multiple cameras are involved.  Cameras used should be able to sense a person’s movements and follows that person as they move in a room and the cameras’ fields of vision.

In the old days of video conferencing and even today, if a user wants to stay in a camera’s field of vision he or she needs to stay in one place.

When a telepresence system tracks a user’s movements it gives the other users the sense they are in the same room.  The key behind telepresence is stimulating the senses sufficiently to draw the users into feeling they are in the same room as users in another room.

Imagine a screen large enough to fill a wall.  Imagine a screen with HDTV (high definition television) resolution.  Imagine the same room with omni-directional microphones (sensitive enough to pick up normal audio level conversation).  These are the types of technologies a telepresence system needs to bring to bear.  Like many technologies, telepresence is finding a market due to the rising cost of business travel.

In addition to Nortel, other vendors in the telepresence arena include:

    -    Cisco
    -    HP
    -    Tandberg
    -    Polycom
    -    LifeSize

I am sure there are other vendors.  The point I am making is that telepresence is here to stay.