Enabling Accurate, Trustworthy Communication

Experience real-time, face-to-face communication and collaboration with colleagues, prospects, and partners, even if they're in opposite hemispheres.

We live in a world of paradox. Technology has allowed us to establish economically advantageous business operations worldwide. However, to excel in today's fast-moving business environment, you have to interact and collaborate with co-workers, partners, and customers all over the world at a moment's notice. You need to continuously innovate and transform your business model to maintain competitive edge. And you need to plan ahead to respond rapidly to unexpected issues that affect business continuity.

At the same time, much of business is still done based on the quality of your relationships with the people with whom you interact most often. To build and maintain these critical relationships, you often need to travel, which translates to lost time and reduced productivity, not to mention valuable time spent away from home and family.

Benefits of Cisco TelePresence

All of this points to the need for a technological solution that allows the same type of face-to-face business interactions, without the constant need for global travel. That's where the concept of Cisco TelePresence comes in. It allows for real-time, face-to-face communication and collaboration over the network with colleagues, prospects, and partners, even if they're in opposite hemispheres. The potential scenarios:

• Corporate Level: executive meetings
• Human Resources: job interviews
• Customer Service: troubleshooting of technically complex products and access to remote experts
• Sales: presentations and demonstrations of products and services
• Design: collaboration between teams with expert involvement as needed
• Consulting: interaction between outside vendors and clients
• Staff Meetings: regularly scheduled updates of projects between personnel at remote sites

Employees derive both personal and professional benefits from Cisco TelePresence. They can:

• Connect "in person" at a moment's notice with customers, partners, and coworkers
• Reduce time to market and make decisions faster
• Use scarce resources more efficiently by making the right resource available at the right time in the right location
• Build better trust, understanding, and relationships across distances and cultures
• Realize greater productivity through more frequent interaction
• Improve quality of life and morale by gaining leisure time
• Make your organization "greener" by using technology more effectively and traveling less

Simplifying the Concept

Despite their relatively low cost, traditional video systems remain unused because they are not reliable, offer low quality, and are too difficult to schedule and use. Cisco TelePresence is a new kind of collaborative application that offers several significant advantages:

• Integration with enterprise groupware (such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes) allows users to schedule Cisco TelePresence meetings in the same way they would send a calendar invitation
• Instead of confusing remote-control keypads used with most television-based systems, users can initiate Cisco TelePresence meetings using a telephone keypad. After scheduling, the meeting information appears on the meeting room's phone display. Users simply select the meeting from the display to launch the call.
• Cameras are positioned for optimal coverage of the room, so participants do not need to adjust them during their meetings.
• The network provides the same reliability as dial tone, making Cisco TelePresence a solution that users can depend on, even for external meetings.
• Services in the network ensure high quality, security, and reliability for every meeting.

The result: Meetings start promptly, proceed smoothly, and aren't hampered by audiovisual difficulties, which is especially important for meeting participants who might be attending outside of traditional work hours. Because of improved visual communication, important contentious issues are discussed more efficiently, with less risk of misinterpretation and confusion. Now, you can focus on the meeting instead of the technology.

Future Applications

The vision for Cisco TelePresence is to provide "virtual experiences" in many environments, from business to home, with applications that would not have been possible using traditional video technologies.