Polycom VP Joe Sigrist:

Customers are looking for telepresence offerings that fit within a broader solution for enterprise-wide visual communication, and Polycom is delivering a comprehensive solution. These new telepresence offerings extend Polycom’s industry-leading telepresence portfolio, giving customers a range of options for different application, space and budget requirements that fit within a comprehensive architecture allowing them to video-enable their entire organization. Supporting enhanced levels of HD resolution up to 1080p gives customers the flexibility to adapt telepresence to their specific network and application needs today and as those needs evolve over time.

The addition of full high definition video to PolyCom’s otherwise extensive line of telepresence offerings, make it a strong contender in the emerging telepresence market. The Polycom HDX 8006 package is available now starting at $17,499, which is significantly less than competing high definition telepresence solutions offered by other companies. The package includes the proprietary codec, an EagleEye 1080p camera, remote and microphone array, requiring you to provide your own monitors and computer system to complete the setup.

The previous Lifesize HD camera that produced only half the frame rate, consumed about 1Mbps in bandwidth, whereas the new Lifesize Conference 200 solution has reduced those bandwidth requirements by 25 percent, allowing networks as slow as dial-up cable modems to be able to use the technology. The new system runs more quietly, more cooly, and has a new video compression algorithm to reduce bandwidth requirements with smoother video playback.

The Conference 200 system supports up to three display HD monitors and another HD demonstration screen for sharing documents and online presentations. In presentation mode, the old Conference camera would drop to 5 frames a second, whereas the new technology drops to 30fps, still fast enough for video, so conferencing and online presentations can occur simultaneously.

The new camera in the package, features 4x optical zoom and 2x digital zoom. The camera interfaces with the industry standard HDMI cable, so it can be used with other video conferencing systems. The LifeSize Conference 200 system is available in the United States for $49,999.

Chambers remarked that the social networking culture driving by the younger generation, will lead the way to the next stage of business technology. While his remarks shouldn’t be considered as an actual forecast of his company’s performance, Chambers predicted that U.S. productivity will rise 3 to 5 percent in the next decade, returning to the boom of the 1990s.

Technologies such as Cisco’s telepresence and video conferencing services will allow businesses to perform tasks much more quickly at a reduced cost. Chambers said telepresence has allowed him to meet with twice as many customers while spending half the time on the road – a process that for Cisco as a whole saved $150 million last year and $100 million this year.

With a general “leadership” theme at the WBF in NY, Chambers argued that improved technology led to a different management model. He said the old style of “command and control,” where he and other top management dictated the process of a new project to others in the company, was at one time the more efficient way to move forward. With collaboration and communication technology making instant online meetings more efficient and affordable, that’s all about to change.

Telepresence solutions strive to make online meetings as realistic as possible. Desks, monitors, and directional microphones and speakers make it seem that you are actually talking directly to a person instead of blankly looking at a camera. While this solution might be the most comfortable and “futuristic” way to communicate, it’s expensive and not necessarily the most productive.

Traditional video conferencing, offered in a wide variety of flavors, is a much more cost effective solution with additional features to enhance collaboration. Whiteboarding, discrete messaging, file sharing and other features allow you to not only see the person you’re communicating with, but collaborate with them on projects simultaneously.

While telepresence may replace board meetings with disparate board members and company officers, as a stand alone technology in a tightening economy it seems inefficient. I think that eventually, telepresence and typical video conferencing systems will merge into a single type of collaboration communication as technology and adoption of the services increase. For now, video conferencing services like InstantPresenter that offer full video conferencing, web conferencing and webinar services at a fraction of the cost of telepresence seems like a much more efficient solution for your business.

Many tech CEOs are proclaiming that telepresence and video conferencing services is the “killer app” of future business communications. As energy costs sore and business travel becomes increasingly expensive, many companies are turning to the technology to cut costs and go green. An estimate by the World Travel and Tourism Council estimates that businesses in the United States spend $180B on business travel annually, and that cost is rapidly increasing.

Cisco’s telepresence system of course isn’t the only available solution. As the demand for the technology increases, so has the number of companies offering a solution. Companies offering comparable videoconferencing packages for conducting virtual meetings include the likes of Hewlett-Packard, InstantPresenter, Tandberg, and Polycom. The common idea of these and other similar products is to make participants in any virtual meeting appear and sound just as they might when attending a meeting in person.

The price of video conferencing services will undoubtedly come down as the technology becomes more widespread. However if energy prices suddenly plummet as fast as they climbed, it remains to be seen if businesses will continue using these video conferencing systems, or if they will quickly revert back to the old-fashioned business travel model. Telepresence and video conferencing is still relatively new, and it remains unclear if it will remain a permanent fixture in the business place.

Polycom Vice President, Joe Sigrist:

The use of visual communication is growing because it effectively addresses major collaboration issues inherent to distributed, enterprise organizations as well as critical business challenges driven by globalization, socio-economic factors and the move toward more environmentally sustainable business practices. Our customers are looking to deploy video more broadly across their organizations from telepresence rooms to mass scale desktop video collaboration. The RMX 1000 supports this as part of Polycom’s comprehensive solution portfolio for visual communication.”

The RMX 1000 and RMX 2000 media servers are optimized for high-performance video conferencing communication. using technology based on open standards, the solutions enable multipoint video conference calls across different network environments and between different types of video devices, transcoding the various speeds and protocols to provide the optimal experience to each system based on the capabilities of the systems in a call.

The RMX 1000 supports HD video, HD content sharing and high quality audio which offers the benefits of both enhanced clarity and stereo surround sound which separates voices when multiple parties speak simultaneously. Like the RMX 2000, the RMX 1000 supports secure online conferencing through AES media encryption and provides an optimal experience even on slower networks with Polycom’s Lost Packet Recovery technology, which minimizes the damaging impact of network congestion and packet loss on the video conference call experience.

Multimedia Educational IT Specialist, Mark Crowl:

The RMX 1000 is a great high performance, multipoint platform for distributed video networks as well as a solid solution for small campuses. Set up was easy — we had the system up and running in under an hour — and we put the bridge through its paces, including cascading calls between the RMX 2000 and RMX 1000. The on-board management and scheduling capabilities are intuitive, and the HD video, content and audio quality is great and well suited for our distance learning and tele-medicine applications.

For small and medium-sized enterprises the RMX 1000 is a cost-effective solution for bringing high-performance multipoint video conferencing capabilities in house. The plug-and-play platform is easy to deploy and contains on-board capabilities for centralized scheduling and management.

Teleprecense systems, like HP’s Halo are forecasted to grow 21. Enterprise group video conferencing systems are forecast to grow at 18% over the next 5 years, twice what the growth rate has been in the last decade. The market for enterprise personal videoconferencing units is forecast to increase much more quickly, predictions indicate it could exceed 50% per year. This rapid increase is driven by multiple factors: adoption of unified communications, the drive to reduce corporate travel, and the emergence of a new class of high performance systems, and an industry push to go green. The overall endpoint market will grow from $1.3B in 2007 to over $4.9B in 2013.

Enterprise Videoconferencing Endpoints and Infrastructure is a 96-page report that includes a complete and detailed product forecast, historical market trends and figures, and a description of the 12 major drivers, as identified by Wainhouse Research, that are taking videoconferencing into the enterprise mainstream.

The report also includes a short description of thirty vendors identified by Wainhouse Research as leaders, influencers, and contenders in the market. Vendors profiled include Adobe, Aethra, AVCON, Avistar, Cisco, Compunetix, Dialcom, DVE, Emblaze-VCON, HP, Huawei, IBM Lotus, IOCOM, Kedacom, LifeSize, Microsoft, Mirial, Polycom, RADVISION, Sony, Tandberg, Telanetix, Telepresence Tech, Teliris, V2, VidSoft, Vidyo, Visual Nexus, VTEL, and ZTE.

Right now we are clearly once again in a boom phase for videoconferencing. With the high cost of travel and rising energy costs, many businesses are once again taking a very hard look at implementing videoconferencing solutions in the hope of cutting down on travel costs and improving worker productivity.

Unlike past videoconferencing services, the current-generation systems do have a few factors in their favor. For one, the video quality nowadays is much higher than in past systems, providing a much clearer picture of colleagues and meeting associates. The new wave of advanced telepresence videoconferencing rooms use high-definition video, multiple video screens around a table and even integrated lighting to provide a videoconferencing meeting environment that is as close to being there as possible.

The biggest challenge to modern video conferencing systems is the increasing growth of Web 2.0 and social networking-based collaboration tools. For many modern workers, while being able to see a colleague through a video conference is nice, if they have to choose between collaborating in a videoconference without access to Web 2.0 collaboration tools or using Web 2.0 online collaboration tools without video, they’ll often choose the latter.

In order to survive past this current boom cycle, videoconferencing systems will need to be able adapt and integrate with the changing way that modern workers collaborate and meet. For now videoconferencing will continue to rise with the difficulty in airline travel and the rising cost of fuel.

The new global gateway will provide users the ability to easily place high-definition video conference calls between users on different networks. The service could be used for HD interviews in lieu of travel to a remote location, pointing to a key reason so many users are turning to webcasting and video conferencing: rising fuel prices.

WBS Connect claims it will bridge disparate HD video conferencing systems for customers from hardware manufacturers such as Polycom, Tandberg, Cisco, and LifeSize. The company said it currently has a presence in carrier-neutral data centers in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Miami, Newark, Seattle, London, Toronto, and Amsterdam.

WBS Connect Managing Partner, Scott Charter:

Telepresence and video conferencing is the killer application for the 21st century.”

Virtual In Person high-definition video conferencing and telepresence is new to WBS Connect. The company’s existing services include IP transmission, Content Delivery Network (CDN) services, data center co-location services, and consulting. It also manages web-based scheduling and a user-centric Video Network Operations Center (VNOC), which it said helps ensure successful videoconferences.

Intellicon Director, Chetan Turakhia:

The system is set to redefine ‘electronic meetings’ greatly enhancing the ‘human factor’ into video conferencing sessions.

Vega X7 is able to independently manage the bandwidth available, automatically adapting the video coding parameters to maintain high definition. Offering the real-time audio and video conferencing, this tool offers the possibility to connect up to nine different multiple locations.