Every time there is a widespread emergency that in some way makes the idea of traveling to meetings seem more unattractive than usual, pundits suggest that it will be a boon for telecommuting and videoconferencing. That’s precisely what happened during the swine flu pandemic. This time around, there also was a buzz around telepresence, which some people see as the next logical stage in the evolution of remote multi-location meetings.

There are several reasons beyond the swine flu that telepresence, which Nemertes Research says is being used or is in the planning stages at 38 percent of companies, is in the ascendancy. Indeed, all the indicators point upward: The broadband infrastructure is far more prepared than before to support quality transmissions without expensive reworking; the explosion of online services has created a workforce that is comfortable in a video environment; the general drive toward green activities makes limiting corporate travel popular and the recession sets telepresence up as an attractive choice – especially if high capital expenditures are avoided through managed services.

Proponents think that telepresence is the right application at the right time. “Telepresence…was not really a mission-critical application until certain things tipped it or created an inflection point. That inflection point is here,” says Joe Laezza, president and co-CEO of service provider Glowpoint. “We see it becoming a mission-critical tool, where historically it has been a nice-to-have tool.”

Telepresence: Here to Stay

The old expression that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” can be applied to the business community’s experience during the past year. A platform instituted as a cost-cutting, save-the-firm measure during the severe recession that proves itself will probably find a spot in the company’s permanent toolbox once the storm waters recede. “I think people are learning what these tools do to save money and seeing that they allow you to enjoy life in a different way and not be stressed out by business travel,” says Andrew Davis, a senior partner at Wainhouse Research. “We will see permanent changes in the way companies do business [including telepresence] coming out of the recession.”

The brief for telepresence is strong. The question that must be addressed now is how it fits into the bigger picture of corporate video collaboration. The first step is to create a working definition of telepresence. This is a bit tricky, because that definition is changing. When telepresence first hit the scene, it was extraordinarily expensive – both in the creation of the room and the costs to run conferences – and was aimed at very top-level executives of big multinationals.

Recently, the price tag has been coming down significantly as vendors and service providers aim to increase the number of users. The strategy is working. Erica Schroeder, the director of marketing for Cisco Telepresence, reports that its rooms are used an average of five or six hours per day. That’s a far cry from the early days of telepresence, when the rooms would sit idle most of the time.

It’s a fascinating transition. When top executives meet, the importance of telepresence may be in catching the nuances of communications and the creation of trust. Once middle-level managers and other staffers use the systems, the focus can shift to more substantive sharing of intricate diagrams and other complex exchanges.

Upper-level management is trained to see the big picture. Upper-level executives using the systems quickly understood their potential value to the people under them, says Bob Johnson, the senior vice president of Marketing and Product Management for vendor and service provider Teliris. This recognition, he says, eventually let a positive dynamic to take hold: Price reductions, both from increased usage and the general tendency of equipment prices to go down over time, have opened systems to smaller companies and to folks lower on the totem pole.

The democratization of telepresence is not without its challenges, however. The sense is that vendors are hedging a bit on the vision of telepresence as a fully immersive experience. While the experience must be good enough for engineers and finance people to accomplish as much as if they were in the same room, the science fiction aspect – telepresence as the “holodeck” on "Star Trek: The Next Generation"  – may be receding a bit.

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