OVERVIEW
The TelePresence World Conference Series
Landmark summits on the emerging technologies of Telepresence, Presence, and Unified Communications
“The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.”
-- William Gibson
Over the next decade, virtually every Global 5000 company will adopt a technology that allows them to interact with people, no matter how far away, as if they were in the same room. The technology is called telepresence, and a variety of Fortune 1000 organizations already use it, reporting both satisfaction and a strong return on their investment.
Telepresence meetings make remote participants life-size, with fluid motion, accurate flesh-tones and flawless audio. The experience feels remarkably natural and comfortable for almost any size meeting--from two people to large classrooms. Telepresence solutions are easy to use and surprisingly handy for collaborating on spreadsheets, slide decks, documents, or even physical objects with minute details. Specialized telepresence solutions for specific industries already exist, for settings as diverse as pharmaceutical research labs, movie and television studios, university-level distance learning, and neurological operating rooms.
Most importantly, telepresence solutions create a “business-class consistency-of-quality” between companies, universities, publicly available telepresence facilities, and other organizations on the same effective visual collaboration networks. This consistency-of-quality between locations, when combined with improved end-user acceptance and usage of telepresence solutions, creates a platform for effective global inter-company business and collaboration which is natural, comfortable, and instantaneous.
These networks are already growing rapidly. Market Engineering Firm Frost & Sullivan estimates that global telepresence revenues will rise over 2000% from 2006 to 2013. As more and more organizations join effective visual collaboration networks, the utility, value, and ROI of being connected to these networks will grow, creating the same potential for exponential growth that characterized telephony and the Internet.
Complimenting and accelerating the telepresence revolution is an equally important revolution in Presence--the ability to know colleagues’ and partners’ availability and connect to them instantaneously--and Unified Communications--the integration of communications to a single in-box for voice, email, fax, webconferencing, video, and ultimately telepresence.
When combined, these technologies have already demonstrated the ability to dramatically improve workflow, save time, and accelerate time-to-market advantage through the ability to:
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Reliably reach co-workers on the first try
• Manage voicemail, email, and faxes from the same inbox
• Instantaneously escalate IM sessions into collaborative video and/or webconferences
• Simplify the calendaring of meetings, webconferences, and videoconferences/telepresence
• Improve the ability of roadwarriors and teleworkers to stay connected to colleagues