Telepresence: A Whopping Touch of Reality to Videoconferencing

This IDC study presents IDC's assessment of telepresence, a technology that has gradually attracted industry attention because of the entrance of heavyweights like HP and Cisco. This study seeks to analyze the value of telepresence and why it is growing in relevance, in a business world that is increasingly relying on a distributed workforce and collaboration. Telepresence uses cutting edge technology to play up the human factors in videoconferencing. With its attention to detail in audio and visual communication and the ambience, telepresence redefines conferencing and remote collaboration so as to open up a world of possibilities in terms of how it could find a fit within an enterprise's operations to shorten sales and product development cycles.

"As more and more customers order telepresence studios, vendors are benefiting from a viral effect of telepresence among existing customers. With exposure to a telepresence studio, customers are starting to ask for more rooms for other locations. Also, as these companies expand, they will use telepresence to deploy employees and resources in new locations," says Shalini Verma, research manager, Asia/Pacific Communications Research, IDC Asia/Pacific. "Furthermore, as customers start to use telepresence to talk to their partners, the partners will also see the value in using these solutions. In this way telepresence vendors can target the entire ecosystem around the original customer."