Telepresence's shrinking presence

IBM adds Cisco Telepresence to its offering, while Cisco gobbles up Tandberg.

The world of telepresence offerings just got a little smaller, or at least more streamlined, as Cisco and Tandberg announced last week that the internetworking giant will buy the Oslo-based videoconferencing company.

Happening in the few weeks prior to the SUPERCOMM tradeshow, which re-emerges in Chicago in late October after several years in exile, the Cisco-Tandberg announcement gives Cisco CEO John Chambers yet another video-related acquisition to add to his presentation fodder. For those of you who may not follow the SUPERCOMM show, Chambers has done many keynotes over the years, with almost every one involving VoIP - voice or video over IP. Chambers has made to secret of the fact that video on IP networks is a growth area he would like to dominate.

The Tandberg announcement makes both strategic and financial sense, if seen in light of the recent IBM announcement that the tech giant will be offering the IBM Converged Communications Services-Managed Telepresence services for its consulting clients.

IBM says the offering will include "design, implementation, concierge and help desk, remote operations, and maintenance and support" and, in a nod to the best pun in recent press release history, IBM says it can provide customers with telepresence units that range from desktop"to life-size screens that sprawl the length of the room." No word yet whether LifeSize, itself a telepresence company that was founded by former Polycom / PictureTel executives, have used their sprawling telepresence units to complain about IBM's use of its name in a Cisco-IBM-Tandberg tie up.

Almost two years ago, an article in Streaming Media magazine talked about telepresence's place in the collaborative computing-streaming pantheon. In addition, a podcast recorded at the same time addressed some of the benefits of using a high-definition (HD) videoconferencing system as an inexpensive way to acquire  content for HD streaming [this would be real HD streaming, not Akamai's "it starts as HD so it must be an HD stream to the iPhone" version]. We think that any opportunity to drive forward HD telepresence - or even plain old HD videoconferencing - will ultimately benefit HD streaming. A forthcoming article on enterprise streaming for Streaming Media magazine will showcase a few best practices in using videoconferencing as remote acquisition tools for live and on-demand streaming content.

Coming back around to the Tandberg deal, Cisco is paying approximately $3 billion for Tandberg. Tiernan Ray over at Barron's blog has a good overview of different analysts' assessments of the deal, but he also points out what all of us who have lived in the videoconferencing world at some point in the past or present are wondering: what does this mean for Polycom? Given Polycom's proximity to Cisco (Milpitas is just an hour down the road from Cisco's headquarters) and the on-again / off-again relationship Polycom and Cisco have had over the years, it's shaping up to be a life-size drama in the making.