Can telepresence provide a real alternative to business travel? The Human Productivity Lab's Howard Lichtman talks about its future impact.

CXO. Many of our readers are familiar with video conferencing. Can you explain how telepresence differs from standard video conferencing and what the main advantages are?

Telepresence describes visual collaboration solutions that address the human factors of meeting participants, and attempt to replicate as closely as possible an in-person experience. Traditional video conferencing until very recently has been what I have referred to as the plastic-camera-on-top-of-the-TV-set-on-top-of-the-dessert-cart, and has been primarily an observant experience where as properly designed telepresence environments and systems create immersive experiences that participants find more natural and enjoyable to use.

The human brain has innate preferences for interpersonal communication. It's used to talking to people that are life-sized, having eye contact and clear audio quality. Your brain has developed innate expectations with respect to interpersonal communications. In a traditional videoconference, it doesn't get many of them so it naturally objects to the experience. I believe there is kind of a dichotomy going on where the brain is trying to pay attention simultaneously to both the medium and the message. It's an unnatural experience trying to pay attention to the medium, the message and the nonverbal cues of communication. With a telepresence session, you're able to more faithfully represent a traditional in-person meeting so attention to the medium is reduced and you're able to have a much more natural experience.

Telepresence satisfies the user acceptance problem, which is for people to use it, they have to like to use it. The experience of telepresence early adopters demonstrated that once you get the human factors of the environment right, the usage goes to the moon. You see telepresence systems that get used 100 to even 150 plus hours per month per endpoint and you see people doing types of meeting in those telepresence environments that they never would have done with the plastic-camera-on-top -of-the-TV-set-on-top-of-the-dessert-cart. That extra usage is what companies want because you're actually getting the ROI that the videoconference guys promised but never delivered. You're actually keeping people off the planes, getting a time-to-market advantage and improving productivity.

CXO. How do organisations effectively measure ROI and what are ways to get the best out of the investment?

For years, video conferencing was promising ROI based on avoided travel - they had all these spreadsheets, wheels and graphs that said if you have all the new video conferencing systems, you will avoid this many trips a month and will save 'x' amount of dollars. But the problem was nobody ever really used the systems that much so they never really received all the advantages that they were promised.

Telepresence providers have proved hands-down that people will use this and will use it six to ten times more than traditional video. There's three ROIs: the hard dollar ROI, the soft dollar ROI and then what I consider to be the most kind of underrated ROI, which is the ROI of opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is a term in economics that refers to the cost of doing what you weren't doing while you were doing this other thing that you can now avoid. So now it's not only that you're avoiding the cost of the airline ticket and the time the executive spent cooling his heels in the airport but also the cost of that executive doing what he would have been doing if he hadn't been traveling. Then there are the other benefits and capabilities that telepresence offers: disaster recovery, the ability to hold meetings that would be impossible in any other format because you can't get all of the people there because of travel or other commitments. There's the ROI of being able to take more people to a meeting than you would have for less money. There's a lot of flexibility that these systems give you that you wouldn't have had otherwise which provides an ROI for business effectiveness which you actually get because these things are actually getting used.

CXO. Do you see any complications around telepresence - looking at how corporate networks may have to handle the extra bandwidth demands?

Probably the main thing that is holding most companies back from deploying telepresence is the hard cost of the systems. Companies need to quit comparing the costs to traditional videoconferencing and start comparing the systems to the cost of commercial and executive aviation, which I believe is the next best alternative to effective, flexible, face-to-face global collaboration. In addition, there is the cost of effectively internetworking telepresence which will often be much greater than the hard cost of the hardware. Telepresence often requires reengineering the network or deploying an overlay network solution or moving your telephone closet to a carrier hotel - and there are the often hidden costs associated with the architectural make-ready for some of the telepresence environments.

CXO. Looking towards the vendor market, can we expect to see vendor offerings giving these services on a "pay-to-play" basis or is it outright ownership?

Publicly available Telepresence is right around the corner and I think that the majority of people will experience telepresence in a publicly available setting before they'll use them in their own company.

Cisco recently announced a deal with Regus - a provider of shared tenant virtual and temporary office space who provides that service in 950 locations in 400 cities in 70 countries. They're going to be rolling out an initial 50 - these are just the first wave - of publicly available Cisco TelePresence systems where people will be able to walk into a Regus facility and either connect initially to another Regus location and eventually have the ability to connect to your enterprise corporate telepresence network or to your vendors, joint-venture partners and/or customers that are using Cisco TelePresence.

We have our own publicly available telepresence conferencing centre business model, Powwow Virtual, that we're trying to spin out of the Human Productivity Lab. It takes telepresence systems from all the major vendors and some of our own designs and makes them publicly available for both smaller companies to rent on a per-use basis. It also allows corporate telepresence users to extend their enterprise telepresence networks with a global network of secure publicly available locations. We have a superb team, an intellectual property strategy around making these centres secure and cost-effective, unique designs and budding partnerships. We are looking for the right investors for a business model with the true potential for exponential growth.

CXO. Video conferencing has been notoriously unreliable and oftentimes hard to use. What kind of reliability and ease-of-use can we expect from telepresence?

One of the reasons that video conferencing has been notoriously unreliable is that it has been historically networked over ISDN networks that would literally just drop calls or fail to connect. In the early days there was something like a five percent plus call failure rate. Now you're looking at IP network devices that run on an IP network. They're always up, reliable and easy-to-use.

Regarding ease-of-use, traditional videoconferencing has been all about the proprietary remote control that is different for every vendor and has required training for all users. Since Cisco deployed in October, they've done 3000 plus telepresence sessions and out of those 3000 sessions they've done no user training.[Editor's Note: This interview was conducted in the fall of 2007.  Since then Cisco has conducted over 40,000+ internal meetings using Cisco telepresence] You simply walk into a room, dial the number of the room that you want to call, you're connected and if you want to share data, you plug into the laptop. One of my favourite quotes on the HP Halo Graphical User Interface was from an executive at PepsiCo who described it as "Fisher-Price Simple." With the HP, Polycom, Teliris and Iformata offer VNOC, reservation, & concierge services and help desk you simply call a number to tell them what city or company that you would like to talk to and walk into the room and the remote participants are sitting on the other side of the table. Teliris and Tandberg have an easy-to-use touch screen GUI to launch and schedule calls.

CXO. So what is it that really sets the telepresence experience apart from traditional video conferencing?

Probably the most important thing to understand is this is not video conferencing 2.0. In addition to the end user acceptance and quality of experience, some of the things that are different from traditional video conferencing include a consistency-of-quality among locations deploying the same telepresence systems. If you go into 50 different traditional video conferencing rooms today, you'd see they're all different. Some of them have the videoconferencing system in the corner, some of them have it at the head of the boardroom table, acoustics and lighting vary in quality. There's no consistency between different video conferencing rooms but telepresence actually establishes a business class consistency-of-quality between every location. Every single time a system connects to another system, the lighting is the same, the acoustics are the same, the camera placement is the same; and you're in the right kind of culturally correct position for a western European business meeting.

This consistency of quality is one of the factors driving what I call inter-company business. Ninety-five plus percent of video conferencing today is intra-company --it is the corporate headquarters talking with the remote office across the country or across the world. Very, very little video conferencing is done company to company or business to business. The reasons for this have been the poor quality of the experience, firewall traversal issues, networking issues and cost issues.

Many telepresence systems are being deployed over what I call effective visual collaboration Community of Interest Networks (COIN) that not only connect their enterprise networks together but connects them to other members of the COIN. What that means is people who have connectivity with HP Halo's HVEN, 'VNOC, Iformata, or Teliris' InfiNET can walk into their telepresence system and connect with their vendors, joint venture partners, and joint venture partners that are on the network.

This dynamic of effective inter-company business is going to be huge. Right now each of these COINs is an island chain. You can reach the other members of your island chain but you can't reach the other island chains. In the future we're going to be able to connect all the island chains or the overall vast majority of the island chains and you're going to be able to have a natural, comfortable productive meeting experience with almost every single company in the world using an enterprise telepresence system or a publicly available telepresence system.

The majority of the global 5000 will deploy these solutions in the next five to 10 years. You'll walk into a room and will think absolutely nothing of doing business with China, India, or even places like the Phillipines or eventually Antarctica - or all of them simultaneously - and it will be like the people are in the room with you. That is amazingly powerful and you're already seeing some of that. AOL is meeting with Deloitte for public accountancy and consulting using Polycom RPX over the Iformata network. HP and AMD are using HP Halo over the HVEN to design their next generation of servers and workstations. Cisco and Regus recently concluded their multi-million dollar deal for the initial purchase of 50 Cisco TelePresence Systems using the technology. So telepresence is already connecting companies globally to their supply chain and partners for effective collaborative work. In the coming years this capability is going to accelerate global business and innovation to a speed that will boggle the mind.

About the contributor

Howard S. Lichtman is a productivity-focused technologist and consultant with specialties in Telepresence and Visual Collaboration and Organizational and Personal Productivity. He is the founder and President of the Human Productivity Lab, an independent consultancy covering telepresence and effective visual collaboration industries and the publisher of Telepresence Options, a comprehensive multi-media survey of telepresence conferencing. Previously, Mr. Lichtman was the Vice President of Business Development at TeleSuite, the world's first commercially successful telepresence provider and an innovator in visual collaboration. He also ran the financial services sales organization at Savvis Communications, which built networks for the financial industry for market data and trading floor technology.

[via CXO Europe]