astro posted on January 23, 2012 13:57
This started as a simple executive interview at last week’s Lotusphere 2012 conference on a telepresence product. Later in the week, evidence mounted that the telepresence market is maturing very quickly and the landscape is also changing quickly. Call it “telepresence time” and hang on fast. First
I’ll share the facts and then the rumors.
Facts – Market Maturity
Gotta love free markets even though Republican candidates are attacking Mitt for exactly that! In technology, it’s always a case of early adopters ascending a curve through general acceptance and final market maturity. Clearly telepresence has ascended very quickly from early adopter to general acceptance and as such, the big boys are getting in the game. At Lotusphere, I talked with both a major player and a well-known second tier player, both making their mark.
I had an exclusive interview with Polycom’s Susan Hayden, an impressive executive vice president in the telepresence area. She shared some very interesting trends, insights and predictions: “Polycom wants conferencing and visual communications to be unambigious. Our vision is to make it pervasive and available everywhere.” Hayden shared. “Harry, in SMB, we are seeing extreme price sensitivity. Polycom understands that things like travel cost reduction means something when implementing telepresence. For example, for the costs to travel to San Francisco for a meeting, you could seriously evaluate a Polycom telepresence solution.”
Hayden went on to recite research about telepresence. She was preaching to the choir as she shared:
• Telepresence changes and increases productivity and the way people work. It’s inherently more productive than calls.
• If “we” talk for an hour, we are inherently more productive with the notion that if I see you and you see me, we have a better understanding.
• You should also watch my video interview (above) with Hayden for more points.
Specific to Polycom’s Real Presence Platform is that it works with IBM’s Smart Cloud and Microsoft’s Lync. It’s open standards-based allowing for wide interoperability. It has an app available for “Sudden additions” to an existing conference. That is, you can invite some using a tablet, phone or laptop to hop on the session.
The “real red meat” vis-à-vis Polycom at Lotusphere was its announcement of Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) solutions to its customers. At Lotuspshere, Polycom unveiled Polycom RealPresence Cloud, a wholesale, carrier-ready offering to enable service providers to quickly bring to market VaaS offerings. RealPresence Cloud solutions are designed specifically for service providers to equip them with the carrier-grade infrastructure, endpoints, and services they need to offer businesses of all sizes subscription-based solutions for video collaboration. The new offering for service providers is designed to accelerate the penetration and adoption of Polycom video collaboration solutions among SMBs (small to medium sized businesses) and enterprises who want either a hybrid solution of both premises-based video collaboration solutions and video on demand, or a pure VaaS solution.
Polycom RealPresence Cloud solutions compress the time-to-market and time-to-revenue for service providers to deliver VaaS solutions. Powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform, the most complete and interoperable solution for universal video collaboration, RealPresence Cloud provides the carrier-grade scalability, reliability, availability, and security required for service providers to offer VaaS to SMBs and enterprises. RealPresence Cloud solutions encompass a fully managed multipoint video service that supports a multitude of connectivity options between standards-based room, mobile, PC, and Web-based endpoints, as well as Microsoft Lync 2010, IBMSametime, and endpoints supporting the non-standard TIP protocol. Service providers can leverage Polycom RealPresence Cloud solutions to offer their customers a true business-to-business VaaS solution without having to fully integrate and support the core infrastructure on-premises. This solution leverages the Polycom RealPresence Network (formerly the Halo/HVEN network acquired from HP in 2011) to allow service providers to fast-track their capability to deliver video from the cloud.
I had another telepresence conversation with Chris Wildfoerster from ClearOne on the Lostusphere expo floor. I wrote about ClearOne’s Collaboration Console almost a year ago here and I’ll follow-up with a test drive shortly.
Rumors
Two well-respected industry sources have shared with me that an early small telepresence vendor may have hit a rough patch with significant layoffs, late payments to its vendors and fulfillment problems. I need to confirm this with the company itself before I’ll say more. However – if true – it signals that the telepresence market is entering a consolidation and shakeout period. It’s a natural act – winner and losers. Just like the political primary season.