Teliris, Cisco's Co-Leader in Telepresence Market

Benoit had an exciting experience of being in a telepresence conference. The equipment was put together by Cisco, probably the market leader. Interestingly, I got in touch with a competitor, back in October: Teliris. The company is privately held (Fidelity Investments holds a stake), but its site is quite informative. Also, the CEO Marc Trachtenberg has a blog ("Before you even think it – NOOOOO Cisco did NOT start the telepresence industry. A company called Teliris did.")

To add to Benoit's story: I posted before on the telepresence market and put together a number of market players, taken from this article. Besides Teliris and Cisco they are mainly Tandberg (TADF.PK), Polycom (PLCM), LifeSize and Telanetix (TNXI).

The people at Teliris threw some interesting info at me:

• Over the past three months (that would be Q3) meetings increased by 20-25% (Teliris also manages the service, so they have insight into these data).
• The average use of the system at Teliris' customers is an impressive 125 hr/mo, or 6 hr/day (for comparison: the average use of videoconferencing is 10.5 hr/mo).
• Check out this 8 minute YouTube video (embedded above) done by Marc and available on his blog too (the last minute or so is the coolest!). He demos the Teliris InterACT TouchTable ("no, this is not the Microsoft surface table"). Really amazing to see how he pushes a document across the ocean.

Comments

[telepresenc...:]

Fact check ... Teliris did not "start the telepresence industry" and Trachtenberg knows this. Telepresence was started in 1993 by a company called Teleport, which was later renamed Telesuites, which was later renamed Destiny Conferencing, which was acquired by Polycom in 2006. See wikipedia for a brief history of this space:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

2008 Dec 04 12:58 PM

[TelepresenT:]

Saying Teleport was the first telepresence system is just as bad, the definition of telepresence is complete subjective. Is it large screens? how large? low latency codecs? how low? multiple screens? how many? high definition?
Most would say it is an "immersive" meeting experience, and that means the "first" telepresence system would be different from one person to the next. The wikipedia entry on telepresence is a terrible source of information on this and seems to be a battleground between vendors, past and present.


On Dec 04 12:58 PM telepresence vet wrote:

> Fact check ... Teliris did not "start the telepresence industry"
> and Trachtenberg knows this. Telepresence was started in 1993 by
> a company called Teleport, which was later renamed Telesuites, which
> was later renamed Destiny Conferencing, which was acquired by Polycom
> in 2006. See wikipedia for a brief history of this space:
>
> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

2008 Dec 05 10:39 PM

[Jim Snowden:]

This article contains many creative aspects to it that is helping to drive the teepresence experience. As Wainhouse Research have pointed out in their well documented white paper, three things need to be present for Telepresence to be truly valuable. They are the expereince must seem natural (the lifelike hd video, is a big step), this Teliris technology is another major step in meeting criteria #1. Second, telepresence must have the audio and video be synchonized and finally, (three) it must be simple to set up.

Thanks for sharing this information.

2008 Dec 06 07:59 AM