Cisco has been pushing TelePresence as the high-end enterprise version of vanilla videoconferencing, since it announced the offering last October. TelePresence uses a number of flat screen monitors, microphones and cameras to help recreate the in-person experience. Cisco will set up a TelePresence room, including just the right color of the walls and furniture, for about $299,000.
Jim Ditmore, Wachovia’s chief technology officer, said the bank needed a way to connect to its branch in Charlotte, North Carolina, which did not have a hub airport and, therefore, had relatively few flight options, as well as one of its major sites in San Antonio, Texas and on others across the country in California.
Wachovia, the fourth largest bank in the US, needed a way for its executives to quickly collaborate, rather than lose time and productivity in travel among its far-flung operations, Ditmore said.
We have other alternatives, but they haven’t been highly effective, Ditmore said, on Cisco’s web site. For example, the video conference network we have in place continues to show very low usage — because the systems are cumbersome, they’re difficult to use and even when they are up and running, they don’t provide great images. Because video conferences under those circumstances don’t offer any major gain, our people simply don’t use them.
Wachovia is looking at TelePresence as a replacement because it promises to capture the nonverbal communication that Ditmore said was valuable in face-to-face collaboration, without many of the costs. To me, that means you can have those difficult discussions, those highly productive discussions that you just can’t have over the phone or with a typical video or audio conference.
Ditmore said Wachovia would use a number of metrics to measure the system’s effectiveness. Obviously, the occupancy rate of the TelePresence conference room would be the first, because it would show how many workers didn’t have to travel to be present at a meeting, he said. The bank also plans to survey those workers to determine how many trips they avoided as a result of using the conference room and what productivity they feel they gained.
We’ll use that to calculate the hard benefits in terms of saved time and cost from the travel avoidance, Ditmore said.
In addition, we’ll look at what we get out of improved collaboration – because in some cases, people would not have bothered to travel; they might have just dialed in to a conference call, he said. Then it would have been a less effective meeting.
Ditmore stressed that Wachovia does not invest lightly in new technology. Currently, there are two TelePresence packages: the Cisco TelePresence Meeting Solution (CTS) 3000, a six-person room with three 65-inch plasma screens, three microphones, three cameras, and a boardroom table, for $299,000; and the CTS 1000, a two-person room with one third of the infrastructure, for $79,000. Each requires the company operating the room to be running version 5.1 of its CallManager IP PBX software, the price of which is not included in the room prices.
Ditmore said if TelePresence proves effective the bank likely would put a system in each of its major corporate sites.
Looking ahead, Ditmore reckons enterprises would eventually be able to connect to each other’s video-conferencing networks.
Cisco previously said it expects to launch, by the end of the year, multi-point and inter-point connections across a company’s wireless area network, rather than just intra-company, using TelePresence.
