Virtually across the table

OFFICE AUTOMATION: Telepresence has the potential to transform how companies function, but it's still too expensive to be widely used.

Picture this "" a conference room with six people deep in discussion, three on each side of a table which has a clear glass panel running down its centre. Look closer "" only three are actually, physically present in the room in, say, New Delhi.

The others could be in San Jose, Mumbai or Shanghai, but their life-size, high-definition images are projected onto a glass partition in the conference room. This "same room" experience "" facilitated through symmetrically-designed rooms with built-in rear-projection displays, hidden cameras mounted on screens which deliver a life-like appearance in each location "" is "telepresence".

Mind you, this is not video-conferencing on steroids. "One gets life-size remote participants, fluid motion, accurate flesh tones, studio quality acoustics and lighting, true eye-contact or an approximation of it, and immersive environments that establish consistent quality among disparate locations," says Yugal Sharma, country manager, Polycom. Video conferencing, he feels, is about staring at somebody's forehead on a low resolution television image, "while telepresence gives you the impression that you're sitting at the table with him".

A Frost & Sullivan analysis estimates that the Asia Pacific telepresence market in 2006 totalled $9.5 million and is expected to be worth $250.8 million by end-2013, growing at a CAGR of 59.6 per cent.

The other major player in the telepresence market, Cisco India, has solutions which "facilitate virtual meetings without jerky video and speech that is not synchronised with lip movements", claims Minhaj Zia, business development manager, Cisco (India and SAARC).

But, at an average list price of $300,000, which includes three big 1,080p television screens, servers, lighting and microphones (but not the network traffic and installation), these telepresence rooms do not come cheap. Standard video-conferencing systems sell at anywhere between $5,000 to $80,000 a room.

Telepresence players may need to sell just 3,500 rooms to hit the billion dollar mark, but few people will spend that much. HP, Cisco and Polycom have had comparable solutions in the market for nearly a year, with each claiming to have sold around 30-40 rooms to clients already.

Polycom is targeting 20 new clients in India while Cisco hopes to take its count to 40 by 2008. Both, Cisco and Polycom hope to clinch clients in the software industry, besides large financial and banking organisations.

But how? "By providing end-to-end solutions," says Sharma. The complete Polycom telepresence-room solutions encompasses all required components. Not just that, "the solutions are modular, enabling companies to move them if a customer changes locations," Zia says.

According to Cisco India, the high cost of telepresence systems reflects, in part, the huge bandwidth they require, compared to regular video-conferencing systems that run at as slow as 384 kilobits per second.

"Telepresence requires dedicated lines running at two-four megabits per second. That provides high-definition video and audio, and allows one speaker to interrupt another without muting the other party," reasons Zia.

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, has already cut his company's travelling allowance by more than 20 per cent, saving around $150 million in the process, and has equipped around 120 rooms across geographies with telepresence solutions for executive briefings.

"Telepresence is an expensive proposition that will limit these systems to a very high end niche," states a report from Wainhouse Research, which does not foresee the industry growing to more than 2,000 units a year.

Besides price and bandwidth usage, the market for telepresence systems in India could be further hampered by low bandwidth availability, coupled with lack of interoperability with existing videoconferencing systems and other business applications.