Telepresence: Pragmatism Prevails Over Enthusiasm
By Tabrez Khan
Mumbai, Jul 29, 2008

In a world where travel entails ever-increasing costs, financially and environmentally, telepresence has come as a refreshing option for enterprises to enable better collaboration without necessitating expensive and environmentally degrading air travel.

Telepresence is a form of videoconferencing that gives you an almost real-life experience through life-size images, duplication of facial expressions, gestures and sounds in real-time. So the person that you interact with on a TV screen seems as if she were physically present with you! Well not quite, but almost.

But are Indian enterprises warming up to telepresence the way the proponents of this innovative technology would like to see them do? As per a recent Frost & Sullivan report, in 2007, the Asia-Pacific market for telepresence solutions was reported at $1.7 million. India accounted for 9.4% of this market, ranking fifth. India is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 42.6 percent, further increasing its share from 9.4 percent in 2007 to 13.9 percent in 2014, as per Frost & Sullivan estimates.

According to Gartner analyst Sanish KB, "India is one of the four fastest growing market in Asia-Pacific along with China, Australia and Japan. Corporate and major enterprises, especially in the IT-ITes segment are the major adopters of telepresence solutions. The recent trend in enterprise connectivity of a shift from ISDN to IP networks will definitely serve as a boost, as greater bandwidth availability and faster connections can support telepresence better."

According to Ranajoy Punja, vice president, advanced technologies division of Cisco, India & SAARC, apart from the IT & ITes segment, banking and financial institutions are also adopting telepresence solutions.

"The driving factor for IT/ITES companies to adopt telepresence is the need for better collaboration between geographically dispersed work force and customers. Financial companies have also been using telepresence solutions to expedite their decision making processes in an industry that is highly competitive," he says.

Lifesize Communications, a major player in telepresence and video-conferencing solutions, claims to have more than 750 installations across the country already and counts companies such as Satyam, Reliance, L&T, Yes Bank and Barclays Bank among its clients. Cisco that was among the first to launch telepresence has clients that include EMC, Yahoo and ANZ IT globally, and the Tata Group and Confederation of Indian Industries in India.

"An interesting vertical where this technology has gained ground is government," adds Punja. "There has been a need to improve the decision making process in government too and with the help of technology the state headquarters are a click away from district headquarters." Cisco has several government departments as its clients claims Punja, but declines to disclose names due to a non-disclosure agreement.

However, it's not as if telepresence is already there or the most in-thing in enterprise communications technology. There are issues that still need to be sorted out before enterprises adopt it wide scale. Telepresence requires high-bandwidth to the tune of 8mb-15mb, which even bigger organizations may not be able to spare for a single application.

Cost is also a limiting factor for enterprises when they think of deploying telepresence solutions. An average telepresence suite can cost as much as $ 300,000 (About Rs 1.2 crore) for a single room, making enterprises mull a lot before buying the solution, if at all.

"How many organizations can afford a $2,00,000 suite for a single room?" questions Shiva Sankar, country manager, Lifesize India. "At $ 10,000 per suite surely, but not at $2,00,000," he adds.

Gartner analyst Sanish KB concurs with the view saying, "Cost is a big impediment so while big enterprises whose executives do a lot of air travel for business meets find good returns by investing in telepresence, medium ones may not find that much utility."

Lifesize, however, claims to have an answer to that. It offers customized videoconferencing solutions according to an organization's needs and these it claims have telepresence quality. "We offer entry level products priced at Rs 2.8 Lakh (about $7000), which is 10 times better than standard videoconferencing solutions that cost around Rs 1.8-2 Lakh (around $5000) per solution. For a marginal difference in price you get telepresence quality. For higher priced solutions the telepresence experience and quality gets more advanced and better. Our most expensive solution is priced at Rs 7.8 Lakh (about $20,000)," says Shiva Sankar.

Dedicated telepresence solutions for enterprises, however, still remain a proposition that has to be evaluated in all its pros and cons before it becomes popular.

Managed telepresence services on the other hand seem to offer better ROI to enterprises in the short-term. Tata Communications claims to lower costs of implementation of its Telepresence Exchange Services for customers by offering managed infrastructure. It has partnered Cisco to offer the latter's telepresence solutions to enterprises through public and private telepresence rooms.

With unified communications gaining ground, telepresence and high definition videoconferencing would seem inevitable. However, vendors and service providers will have to achieve a degree of customization as per the need of the Indian enterprise, if they want to see real big numbers in the telepresence market. "Overall, deployment would depend on each organizations' unique business dynamics and whether they perceive a need for this solution or not," concludes Sanish KB of Gartner.


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