The company, with joint HQs in New York and London, has been in existence since 2001, providing the kind of immersive conferencing capability now referred to as telepresence, a marketing term designed to distinguish it videoconferencing, which still labours under the negative connotations of the ISDN era.
Teliris gained visibility after the September 11 attacks, which brought a number of corporate customers to seek its services as an alternative to air travel. Its longevity is also the source of its market leadership, in that it has had time to install what CEO Marc Trachtenberg claims are over 100 of its rooms in enterprises around the world, where HP and Cisco have only joined the fray over the last year, and so are obviously coming from behind.
Trachtenberg also claims the leadership in technological terms, since Teliris is now on its fourth generation, launched at the end of October. That launch also saw some re-branding, with the product/service changing from GlobalTable to VirtuaLive, which Teliris says is the only broadcast-quality high-definition telepresence offering in the market, since it delivers 60 frames per second, where the competitors are still at 30. It also claims a more exact eye-to-eye experience on the 55- and 70-inch LCD screens it specs for and buys from an ODM manufacturer, based on its Hyperion screen technology.
Like HP’s Halo room offering, Teliris both sells the hard- and software for the rooms and manages the service thereafter, either over its own InfiNet network or on the customer’s own WAN. It charges between $85,000 and $300,000 for a room, depending on the number of participants supported, the VirtuaLive rooms being capable of handling between six and 25 per room.
This compares to six per room in both Cisco’s TelePresence and HP’s Halo rooms, Trachtenberg noted. As for pricing, a Halo room’s hardware costs around $500,000, with network and service fees of around $20,000 a month, while the TelePresence has two price points, $79,000 for a two-person room and $299,000 for a six-person one.
In addition to that you need CallManager and an Active Directory license, so it really increases to about $350,000, and of course, you’ve got one vendor selling you the kit, another the network, and potentially still another for the service, so Cisco can’t give you an SLA, argued Trachtenberg. Teliris’ monthly fee is between $5,000 and $10,000, he went on.
Teliris is also ahead of the competition in being able to handle point-to-multipoint meetings with VirtuaLive. Cisco has promised this capability for the first half of 2007, with plans to extend it from intra- to inter-company communications later in the year, with service provider partners coming in with the security required when communications start going outside corporate firewalls.
Trachtenberg said he also expected this B2B phase of telepresence to take off only in 2008. Companies are only just doing intra-company today, then they’ll expand it out to their business partners, he argued.
