We continue our series profiling the leading firms in the telepresence industry with a profile on telepresence and videoconferencing network provider: MASERGY. You can browse our Company Profile archive for previous companies profiled including Teliris, Cisco, Polycom, Glowpoint, TelePresence Tech and others. You can subscribe via RSS or e-mail to receive Company Profiles of other leading telepresence firms as they are published. All the Company Profiles will be published in the upcoming hard copy Telepresence Options 2010 Yearbook which you can receive for free by subscribing here.

MASERGY is a next-generation carrier that has redefined enterprise wide-area networking by delivering innovative products, advanced capabilities and a superior customer experience, all on an integrated global IP/MPLS network. The company's WAN services and advanced networking capabilities deliver a superior customer experience with VPN options, including VPLS and Private IP, that support seamless network convergence for superior voice and video performance. MASERGY provides flawless performance for Telepresence, high definition or standard video communications to any customer location and the industry's strongest SLA. Through partnerships with BT Conferencing's Global Video Exchange and IP-V Gateways, MASERGY offers connections to thousands of organizations using telepresence and videoconferencing. 

Cisco has made a number of new TelePresence product announcements including releasing a new signaling protocol that will allow other vendors to effectively connect with and inter-operate with Cisco TelePresence endpoints while keeping the correct eye-lines, spacial acoustics, and data collaboration capabilities.  The company has also announced a new, enhanced version of its flagship six seat telepresence group system: The Cisco CTS 3010 and a new enhanced version of its 18 seat classroom: The Cisco CTS 3210.  Cisco has also announced five new telepresence "experiences" or application specific customizations of its existing systems.  Find out what it all means with Telepresence Options Publisher Howard Lichtman's Thoughts and Analysis including his prediction and reasoning why 2010 will be the year that Inter-company telepresence and videoconferencing takes off

Polycom and Juniper announced a partnership in telepresence and videoconferencing on Monday where they will cooperate to make carrier and large enterprise networks "application - aware" of telepresence and videoconferencing traffic.  The partnership will connect Polycom's Video Control Platform (Distributed Media Application (DMA 7000) in real time with Juniper's Network Operating System (Junos) to make Juniper/Junos networks "application aware" when setting up telepresence and videoconferencing sessions and allow the network to dedicate bandwidth and resources for the call. Get the complete scoop with Telepresence Options' publisher Howard Lichtman's Thoughts and Analysis.

The big stories for the telepresence and visual collaboration industry coming out of last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is the rapidly developing "Battle for the Living Room" where telepresence and videoconferencing companies, consumer electronics companies, and networking providers have unsheathed their swords in the billion dollar contest to provide two-way videoconferencing over broadband internet connections to the home. Cisco, Polycom/IBM, and Skype/Panasonic/LG have all announced and/or demonstrated products that will bring high definition videoconferencing into the living room. In this article, I take a look at the current and future applications for home telepresence and videoconferencing, the various business models, the players who announced they are heading to the living room at CES and the other potential industry participants lurking in the home office and on the family computer who just might join them.    

Independent research firm and consultancy, Human Productivity Lab and Brockmann & Company, the customer insight firm, have published the industry's first comprehensive handbook on inter-company telepresence and video conferencing. "The Inter-Company Telepresence and Video Conferencing Handbook" educates CIOs, executives, managers, telepresence and video conferencing professionals about the opportunities, challenges and solutions for inter-company telepresence and video conferencing with partners, vendors, and customers.  

The Handbook comes during a week when a blizzard shut down much of the northeastern United States, 2,000 rail passengers are abandoned below the English Channel for hours, and a British Airways union threatened to strand tens of thousands of passengers.

Tata Communications is a global provider of telepresence solutions and services.  The company's telepresence portfolio includes:

Public Telepresence - A global network of publicly available Cisco TelePresence Suites that can be rented by the hour. Built in collaboration with Tata's community of partners like Starwood Hotels and service providers like PLDT and Neotel, the Tata public rooms are located in leading business centers and hotels around the world .  Tata has also partnered with leading travel management providers Carlson Wagonlit Travel and American Express Travel to offer telepresence as a business travel option. To telepresence-enabled organizations, they can extend their internal network of Cisco TelePresence rooms with Tata's growing network of publicly available locations worldwide.

Telepresence Managed Services - Tata provides a managed service for Cisco TelePresence that includes network, equipment deployment, maintenance and management, reservation support and concierge service, help desk, and hosted video network infrastructure. 

Telepresence Exchange and Internetworking - Tata Communications runs one of the world's largest global private IP networks and offers overlay and converged network solutions with the QoS demanded by telepresence. The company also runs the Tata Global Meeting Exchange, a networking platform that connects private enterprise telepresence networks to other private , carrier and publicly available telepresence networks including Tata's global network of publicly available Cisco TelePresence Suites. This globally distributed and open Telepresence Exchange can enable enterprises to connect with their business ecosystem.

Telepresence interoperability is an issue near and dear to my heart and it is a topic that we will be covering in our upcoming publication: The Inter-Company Telepresence and Videoconferencing  Handbook which will be released next week.  Because there are a variety of telepresence vendors and systems inter-operability is the key to effective inter-company telepresence which is the key to dramatically improving the utility of telepresence I.E. Who you can connect with and what you can accomplish in telepresence environments.

The first industry-wide immersive telepresence interoperability demo was held at the Fall Internet2 meeting in San Antonio, Texas in October.  The trial successfully connected multi-codec systems from Polycom (TPX HD 306, RPX 200, and RPX 400), LifeSize (Room 100), and Tandberg (T3), all of them operating on different networks (Interenet2, Commodity Internet, Polycom network, IBM network, and Tandberg network).  Eight test cases covered multipoint calls using both voice switching and continuous presence. The telepresence systems connected to either Polycom RMX 2000 conference server (controlled by the Multipoint Layout Application, MLA) or to Tandberg Telepresence Server, while the two servers were connected to each other. Basic connectivity worked in all eight test cases.

From what I could discern from the coverage of the event much of the interoperability trials revolved around the basics of connecting disparate video codecs through various pieces of video network infrastructure.  The result was a variety of traditional videoconferencing continuous presence (CP) layouts across the multi-screen displays of a variety of telepresence systems.  While this is a very important capability and the ability to participate in a multi-site continuous presence call across the multiple screens, videowalls, and large beam-splitters of telepresence systems is a dramatically better experience than CP multi-point over a single screen, this only represents one aspect of telepresence interoperability. 

Ultimately for true telepresence interoperability the ability for disparate systems to connect (through video network infrastructure and point-to-point) while maintaining as much of the "magic" of the telepresence experience as possible will be neccessary: telepresence multi-point where life-size participants from each remote site are displayed side-by-side in a global roundtable format with correct eye-lines and spatial acoustics, effective data collaboration between disparate systems, and a framework for inter-company scheduling and meeting governance.  Our upcoming publication: The Inter-company Telepresence and Videoconferencing Handbook will have what I believe to be the fist attempt to measure this level of interoperability between disparate systems. 

The best coverage of the Internet2 interoperability event was from Stefan Karapetkov, Director of Emerging Technologies at Polycom, who posted coverage on his excellent blog: Video Networker which we are republishing here with video and images from the event.  If any of the other vendors or participants have similar coverage and/or responses then please forward them to me at HSL(at)HumanProductivityLab(dot)com and I will include them as well.  

BrightCom is the designer and manufacturer of fully integrated, processor based, and software driven, telepresence and video conferencing solutions. The company offers a wide range of options to connect people, content and data from home offices, mobile devices, desktops, conference rooms, work spaces and telepresence suites simultaneously around the world. BrightCom's Lumina Telepresence allows for life-like, instant communication empowering businesses with a fully immersive environment for natural collaboration and conversation. Ranging from personal one to one telepresence to fully customized suites that accommodate up to 12 people, Lumina Telepresence empowers businesses with a natural setting for everyday, instant teamwork, brainstorming and decision-making.

BrightCom's Visual Collaboration System 2.0 provides the infrastructure for Lumina Telepresence and ClearView Video Conferencing Solutions. Unlike other solutions, VCS 2.0 is a single network appliance that provides businesses with meeting administration, meeting scheduling, a complete set of web conferencing features and NAT firewall traversal. High definition video, standard definition video and audio broadcasts are integrated with the data broadcasts. This can be displayed in a multi-screen layout that the meeting moderator can configure. Alongside multiple data broadcasts, VCS can also display up to 16 subdivision on multiple video screens that can be seen by an unlimited number of participants.

Via Associated Press SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cisco Systems now says it has control of enough Tandberg ASA shares to take over the Norwegian company. Cisco had said Thursday that stockholders representing only 89 percent of the shares had accepted its $3.4 billion bid -- just shy of the 90 percent required to close the deal. But on Friday Cisco revealed that it has already bought up enough shares on the open market to raise its total stake above 91 percent and clinch its acquisition of the world's largest videoconferencing equipment maker. It comes after a hard-fought takeover effort. Cisco's original offer of $3 billion attracted less than 10 percent of the company's shareholders. It was forced to raise the bid and extend the deadline for accepting before enough shareholders agreed to sell.

TANDBERG today announces its T3 Custom Edition, an integration kit for systems integrators to design flexible collaborative workspaces based on the T3 telepresence platform.  The kit's list price is $249,000 and includes three C90 codecs, three PrecisionHD 1080p cameras, telepresence control unit, presentation splitter, collaboration video switch and 1 x 22" Full HD touch screen but it missing the many elements including screens and microphone arrays that would be unique to each environment.  TANDBERG released an image of a 19 seat large group / classroom system built on the T3 platform.  You can read the official TANDBERG press release here.

By Chad Berndtson, ChannelWeb

Consolidation in the networking, infrastructure and collaboration spaces is nothing new, but if planned acquisitions by Cisco (NSDQ:CSCO) and Logitech are successful, the videoconferencing space will be a whole new landscape in 2010 -- dramatically different than even a few months ago.

Where that leaves Polycom -- the lone videoconferencing player with the scale to be considered a contender -- is anyone's guess.

By Peter Burrows @
Business Week

Cisco has sweetened its acquisition offer for Norway-based videoconferencing company Tandberg by 11%, to $3.4 billion. That should be enough to satisfy the 90%-plus of investors who had withheld their support for the existing deal. The company says more than 40% of Tandberg shareholders, including the largest ones, have "pre-accepted the offer."

We have just published the November issue of the Telepresence Options Telegraph, our newsletter that covers telepresence technologies and the telepresence industry.  We have moved from an HTML newsletter to a downloadable PDF which we believe makes for a more exciting and visually impactful publication.  It also has greatly simplified the production of the newsletter so you can expect to see the Telegraph published on a more regular basis.  You can subscribe to the Telepresence Options Telegraph Here: http://www.telepresenceoptions.com/syndication/

Telepresence and videoconferencing hardware manufacturer LifeSize Communications was acquired by PC peripheral powerhouse Logitech (NASDAQ: LOGI) in an all-cash deal reported to close in December.  LifeSize which has raised $78 million dollars in venture capital investment from Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Pinnacle Ventures, Tenaya Capital, and Norwest Venture Partners has estimated sales of $90MM for 2009.  Logitech which is one of the leading manufacturers of PC peripherals including computer mice, keyboards, speakers, and most importantly and pertinently webcams had revenue of $2.37 billion in 2008 and $2.2 billion in 2009.  This acquisition is their largest ever.   LifeSize will continue as an on-going concern as a division of Logitech and will retain their brand, Austin headquarters, and CEO Craig Malloy. 

Official LifeSize Press Release