Telepresence: Tandberg & Polycom Shine as Mid-Market & Small Business Interests -- Event Platforms Look to Integrate with Mid-Tier Vide

Experts following the virtual world seem to agree that in 2010, to capture mid-market and small business interest, virtual event platforms will integrate with mid-tier video conferencing systems. Two of the top companies making headlines when it comes to video conferencing systems are Tandberg and Polycom.

A recognized global leader in telepresence, video and voice communication solutions, Polycom recently announced an expansion of its integrated voice and visual communication solutions for customers deploying IBM Unified Communication and Collaboration environments with support for Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes. The combined solution is designed to give users "one-click" access to on-demand voice and video collaboration tools from within Lotus software applications that can enhance teamwork, reduce costs, and help accelerate enterprise decision making among colleagues, customers and business partners.

"Telepresence", a virtual event keyword, frequently conjures up images of a select group of business-suited executives brought together around a table using high-quality visual communications. Tandberg recently introduced the Tandberg T3 Custom Edition, a customizable telepresence solution that shatters that image, bringing that same in-person experience to engineers, fashion designers, and educators who want to collaborate naturally with suppliers, buyers and students in a flexible workspace. This growing demand for high-quality video outside of the boardroom is just one trend driving telepresence innovation.
According to Joe Sigrist, senior vice president and general manager of video solutions at Polycom, people are most effective when the communication and collaboration tools they need are instantly available as part of their everyday workflow.

"Polycom's integration with the IBM UC2 environment puts our powerful, productivity enhancing collaboration tools just one-click away within the applications that millions of people use every day to communicate with others,” Sigrist said. “This allows customers to extend the value of their UC investment by adding scalable, standards-based telepresence, video and voice collaboration capabilities that can further enhance efficiency and reduce costs."

Sigrist said the Polycom solution will allow users a "Click-to-Call" and "Click-to-Conference" telepresence, video, voice and unified (combined voice and video) conferencing from presence-enabled contacts within IBM Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes. In addition, Lotus Sametime Web conferencing users will be able to launch Instant Meetings with voice and video conferences, or include a voice or video conference as part of a scheduled web conference.

According to Scott Morrison, an analyst at Gartner, earlier this year Gartner predicted that by year-end 2012, increased utilization of video telepresence solutions would save organizations $3.5 billion annually in travel costs.

“As more and more companies seek to realize the benefits of visual collaboration technologies, the industry will need to find innovative ways to expand offerings to address evolving customer challenges and needs,” Morrison said.

Tandberg’s new T3 Custom Edition, which maintains the superior Tandberg experience with natural eye-to-eye communication, a consistent touch user interface, and seamless interoperability, allows integrator partners to customize Tandberg’s award-winning T3 technology to meet specific customer needs. These needs include catwalks in the fashion industry, collaboration spaces for R&D teams, immersive education auditoriums for higher education, and laboratory settings connecting global research teams.

See telepresence solutions at the Virtual Edge Summit February 22-23 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Register free at http://www.virtualedgesummit.com.

The Polycom integrated solution will provide organizations with a scalable, redundant, standards-based infrastructure platform for rich-media conferencing within IBM UC2 environments. The solution will feature integration with the latest release of Sametime Release 8.5, IBM Lotus Sametime Server and IBM Lotus Domino Server, and provide seamless call routing between the Lotus applications and Polycom immersive, room and personal telepresence systems and desktop and conference room video conferencing systems for point-to-point video calls, and the Polycom RMX media conferencing platforms for multi-site voice, video or unified conferences. The standards-based solution allows users to leverage existing investments in visual communication systems for greater ROI and provides a broad ecosystem of nearly two-million standards-based telepresence and video conferencing systems in use today for extended collaboration.

According to Odd Sverre Ostie, vice president telepresence and advanced solutions at Tandberg, the Tandberg T3 Custom Edition is a direct response to the expanding market for telepresence, where customers are demanding the highest-quality visual collaboration beyond the boardroom in labs and classrooms and on manufacturing floors.

“Tandberg is implementing telepresence solutions into unique education settings, and we have been chosen for the industry’s first virtual fitting room, which will revolutionize the fashion industry,” Ostie said. “This is just the beginning of a trend toward accessible high-quality visual communication that improves our lives in ways most people have not imagined possible.”

Polycom’s announcement expands existing integration that the company offers with IBM UC2 and will complement the existing services offering between Polycom and IBM Global Technology Services to deliver scalable, security-enriched and highly-available unified communications solutions to enterprise clients around the globe.