What Is WebEx Telepresence? How do WebEx and Telepresence come together?

WebEx is a program that runs on your browser allowing you to collaborate on-demand with other people.  The original WebEx program consisted of voice capabilities and content sharing. It allowed users to have a voice conversation while simultaneously sharing whatever was on their PC screen with the other users on the WebEx call. You can incorporate Webex into many different workplace designs if you plan accordingly and have the right partner to install them.

Cisco bought WebEx in 2007 and has continued to enhance its capabilities, by adding key features, such as video, and by developing a whole suite of WebEx products. These products take the same basic capability of WebEx and specialize it for different kinds of online meetings – Webinars, Support, Training, etc.  Each of these meeting environments is a little different and works best with a customized set of tools to manage the online meeting.

Telepresence is the name given to the most life-like video conferencing implementation, which is the closest video conferencing implementation to “being there”.  The size of the video images are life-like and the audio quality is superb making it seem like you are sitting across the table from the people you are meeting with, even though they are in a different part of the world.

With two great products – WebEx and Telepresence, it was natural that people would soon ask for the two to be able to connect to each other.  Last year, Cisco introduced an update to their Telepresence solutions called WebEx Telepresence.

So now callers in a video conferencing enabled room can connect via video with remote participants who are using WebEx video.

WebEx Telepresence allows participants in WebEx meetings to connect via video with participants using Telepresence video conferencing endpoints (traditional H.323 and SIP videoconferencing).  Standard room based videoconferencing systems use H.323 or SIP as the protocol to connect rooms and control the call.  Traditional manufacturers, like Cisco and Polycom, use these protocols.  WebEx on the other hand, uses a proprietary protocol that is unable to directly communicate with traditional room systems.

What is the big deal with integrating one video technology with another?

Many videoconferencing industry insiders envision a future where video conferencing is ubiquitous. They believe that it will replace voice as the main real-time communications tool in the not too distant future.  However, one of the main roadblocks preventing this is interconnectivity between video systems.  The interconnectivity problem is that different technologies are using different protocols (languages) and until they either all speak the same language or translate the protocols between them seamlessly they can’t talk to each other.  I doubt that cell phones would have ever exploded 20 years ago, if users on the AT&T network couldn’t call Verizon customers or if Android phones could only call other Android phones.

To your average user, particularly those who use consumer video conferencing technologies like FaceTime and Skype, this seems like a straightforward task to accomplish.

“If I can FaceTime with Mom to wish her a Merry Christmas from the beach in Costa Rica, surely an enterprise boardroom should be able to make a video call to a PC based video desktop, particularly if they are both using Cisco products”

But we also know that Skype users can’t connect with FaceTime users – different protocols.  Those of us in the business know that getting all the video technologies to work together is easier said than done. It took Cisco almost four years since the acquisition of Tandberg in 2010 to get WebEx to talk to their Telepresence systems, resulting in the launch of WebEx Telepresence.

Why is it important?

I have many different clients who have been eagerly waiting for this capability. Some are educational institutions who want to leverage existing rooms, equipped with HD cameras, codecs and audio systems, to collaborate with research partners who could be located anywhere in the world and equipped only with a laptop.

Others are large enterprises that want to connect individual employees in remote locations with groups in central locations, who have access to video conferencing enabled boardrooms.

Sure there are many ways to tackle these requirements with different technologies, but when you have already made an investment in videoconferencing enabled rooms, infrastructure and WebEx, it makes a lot of sense to be able to connect them together.

WebEx has an excellent reputation for providing desktop web conferencing and superior audio conferencing capabilities. The addition of WebEx Telepresence means that these features can now be added to the high end video call experience. Unlimited audio users can also join a video call from anywhere in the world, be it from a phone or desktop computer. This new capability also means that iPad users can now join a video call on a Cisco system with high resolution video.

What is required?

In order to implement WebEx Telepresence you will need to have the following infrastructure, at the right release levels:

Summary

WebEx Telepresence offers a great way to connect two powerful collaboration worlds – WebEx and Telepresence. WebEx Telepresence solves one particular problem; connecting remote WebEx based videoconferencing participants with Telepresence room based systems.

Whether or not WebEx Telepresence makes sense for your organization will largely depend on what you are starting with or your current infrastructure.  If you already have Cisco video infrastructure and are using WebEx then it’s definitely worth looking at combining the two together to create an even more powerful collaboration environment.

Allowing different videoconferencing systems to communicate is a positive step towards ubiquitous videoconferencing.

Contact us if you have questions or would like assistance in connecting the WebEx and Telepresence systems.

3 Real-Life Solutions to Ensure Video Conferencing Adoption

I was really disheartened the other day when I heard an IT Director at a major consulting company say that they have video conferencing equipment deployed across the country but they don’t use it much.  It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard this before, it takes much more than equipment deployment to make collaboration technology (in this case video conferencing) catch on.

Being an avid user of video conferencing, I am always baffled about why people don’t use their video conference solution. But I realize that it’s a little like John McEnroe asking why everyone doesn’t play tennis. As a seasoned pro, I always want to get to the bottom of what hampers adoption.

So I asked, “Why don’t people use it?”

His reply: “I blame myself for not really understanding the deployment.  We wanted to bring 3 locations into a single video call and each location has dual screens.  So if I am in Toronto and want to have a call with our New York and San Francisco offices, I want to be able to see New York on one screen and San Francisco on the other screen, but I can’t.  I have to look at them both crammed into one screen. So we don’t use the equipment much.”

Unfortunately for this IT director and many like him, that is a lot of money spent on a wasted video conferencing implementation.  This is a very real problem and probably a lot more prevalent than you might think.

And he was right. There wasn’t much he could do to get the results he was looking for from his video conferencing deployment (technology design & technology strategy are key for adoption). But that doesn’t mean you have to repeat the mistake he made.  You can achieve exactly what the consulting company wanted to with multiple locations on separate screens in the same call.

In fact there is more than one solution but the price difference between them is very different.

First, let’s define the problem.

• Most phone calls are between two people and likewise so are most video calls.  The tech speak for a video call between two people is a “point-to-point” call.  And if you continue the tech speak analogy, a video call with more than two people is a multi-point call.

• Most of the traditional video conferencing vendors – Polycom, Cisco, LifeSize, Radvision, Sony, etc., use a communication protocol called H.323 and when a multi-point call is made using H.323, what happens is that the video streams from each location are “combined” and sent to the other locations as a single stream.

• So in the example above, the Toronto location would get a single video stream sent to it which has the people from New York and San Francisco “combined” into a single video stream.  This single video stream can only be viewed on a single screen – it can’t be split up over two screens.  This practice causes the video images of the remote locations to shrink on the display, dramatically diminishing the value of the video images.

In other words, the screen real estate which the people in the other locations occupy on the screens is drastically reduced.  Screen real estate was critical to the Consulting Company and real estate is critical to a good video conferencing experience – see these blogs for more…

So what can you do to achieve video conference adoption?

Option 1: Have More than One Codec

With all the traditional video conferencing vendors, if you set up each location with 2 codecs and 2 cameras, you then have each codec in the office call one of the other 2 offices.  Then all the participants will be full screen on one of the 2 screens in the room.

Problems with Option 1

Twice as expensive; clumsy call operation; this solution will not scale.  Besides the obvious cost differential of adding a second codec and camera at each location, trying to integrate and operate two separate calls simultaneously is very difficult and most end users will never pull it off.  The scaling problem comes into play if you try to use this solution when adding in a 4th or 5th location into the call.

Option 2: Go Telepresence

This is similar to Option 1 in that there are either multiple cameras or codecs deployed in the Telepresence rooms but the images are stitched together and combined and sent to other locations as a single image to be displayed on a set up that is exactly the same (physical mirror images of each other) at the other locations.

Problems with Option 2

There are no problems with this type of deployment, however they are very expensive.  It takes a lot of technology, network and integration to elegantly pull off the high end Telepresence solutions.  But they are elegant and they work beautifully.  These rooms also tend to become dedicated “Video Conferencing Rooms” and not multi-purpose.  This is not good or bad, just a fact.

Option 3: Use a Different Video Technology

If you move out of the H.323 world and move to a newer video technology, you can deploy room systems that will allow you to use a single processor (codec equivalent) to put full screen images on both of the screens in the Toronto – New York – San Francisco example.  These commercial video solutions will allow for support for two screens with active presence or video on each screen.  The video architectures will let you move beyond 2 screens and go up to 20 screens – Hollywood Squares Plus!!!

Note: This solution would not only have provided the Consulting Company with exactly what they were looking for but it would have cost them less than the video solution they deployed.

Problems with Option 3

There are no problems with this approach except that if you have an existing video deployment like the Consulting Company mentioned above, you have to basically replace the core of the old solution with the new (except for the screens), plus, if you do go beyond a 2 screen system you will need to invest in additional decoders for each of the extra screens beyond the initial two.

There are very good solutions out there to make your video collaboration experiences as good, or better, than actually being there!  Doing it right will increase the velocity of collaboration in your organization.

Stay tuned to the blog for some of the upcoming topics including best options for sharing content and video in a collaborative call.