Eating Their Own Dogfood

Cisco talked and showed off its Telepresence technologies at C-Scape. It's all impressive stuff, including the numbers. Cisco rattled off a bunch of stats regarding its own internal TelePresence usage -- the numbers mentioned below came out pretty quickly but we think our notes are accurate -- currently Cisco has 161 TelePresence rooms deployed today and expects to have 244 by July. So far they have had 42K TelePresence-enabled sessions. And Cisco's analysis in November of 6,000 employee users showed a 46% reduction in travel expense and a 31% reduction in entertainment expense (and a 400% increase in bandwidth usage). Chambers' overall plan is that the Cisco will decrease customer face to face meetings but increase the frequency of customer interactions using Web 2.0 and TelePresence technologies. TelePresence looks great but there are still things that need to be done -- like Inter -- corporate TelePresence usage so that Company A can interact with Company B. Plus, eventually there will need to be some standardization of sorts so that Vender A's Rooms can interact with those of Vendor B (HP HaloRoom interacting with Cisco TelePresence for instance). It's neat stuff, that's for sure.