How Can Telepresence ROI be Improved?

Recommended by elsterama on June 18, 2010 via ReadWriteWeb

Radvision's Tsahi Levent-Levi, writing for No Jitter, sums up the obstacles for widespread telepresence use in the enterprise: "It costs so much to purchase such a system and make room (literally!) for it and install it, that even large enterprises will only have 1 room per building for it." The situation leads to upper-level executives' needs taking priority to the needs of the rank-and-file. And that leads to lower overall use of the system.

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When employees can't schedule telepresence conferences because their sessions could be interrupted at any moment by an executive, they will simply opt not to use telepresence at all. This means a low ROI on telepresence equipment - it's expensive, barely used, takes up a lot of valuable real estate.

Levent-Levi's suggested solution is better interoperability between telepresense solutions and more affordable videoconferencing solutions, such as those offered by Radvision. If enterprises with different telepresense and videoconferencing products can talk to each other the products become more valuable. Videoconferencing might be less jaw dropping than telepresence, but if employees can be guaranteed access they'll be more likely to use it.

Levent-Levi has previously criticized Cisco's Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) standard for not bridging the gap between telepresence and videoconferencing, but Cisco is now saying its own videoconferencing solution WebEx will be TIP compatible. According to Levent-Levi, Radivision has licensed the TIP standard, but it already has its own interoperability solution built into its SCOPIA Elite MCU product.