Has High-End Telepresence Topped Out?Has High-End Telepresence Topped Out?

Research from Wainhouse shows strong adoption last year, but more limited prospects for future growth.

Our friends at Wainhouse Research do an annual survey that collects a wealth of information on enterprise attitudes and activities around Unified Communications and video conferencing. They're currently out in the field with their next such survey (and could use your help in getting responses), and Andrew Davis at Wainhouse shared some of the current year's research with us. One of the most interesting charts had to do with adoption of high-end "multi-codec" telepresence--i.e., your classic multi-screen, immersive systems that Cisco pushed as the next big thing when they dived into the market a few years ago.

Here's the trend:

Source: Wainhouse Research

As Andrew pointed out to me, the bar to focus on is the purple one in the middle. The percentage of users who have no plans to deploy multi-codec telepresence has stayed very consistent: Except for one year (2008), when it fell to 51%, the share of respondents with no plans to deploy multi-codec telepresence has stayed between 56% and 60% since 2006. All the movement has been in the other areas: Actual use has grown, especially in the latest year, but that's mostly come out of those who were already in the pipeline: Those who'd said they were already testing or planned to deploy within a year.

Furthermore, attitudes seem to be hardening. In 2006, more than 20% said they didn't know whether they'd deploy multi-codec systems; in the latest survey that's been whittled down to just 6%, suggesting that the "gettable" market is shrinking.

Not only does this chart suggest that prospects for further multi-codec deployment are limited, it also offers a case study in how the vendors might choose to manipulate the messaging to make this market seem more promising than the data really supports. If you just look at the share who have telepresence in use (the light blue bar at far left), you see strong growth, especially from 2009 to 2010: A vendor might well make the case that deployments are accelerating, that in fact they nearly doubled from 2009 to 2010. But what the whole chart tells you is that there's strong reason to doubt that this growth can continue much longer.

At a high level, this makes sense. Choices in video are proliferating, but the action is on the desktop, where "good enough" video is becoming nearly ubiquitously available. And room systems that aren't multi-codec offer a more affordable alternative to the immersive systems, while new options that didn't exist in 2006--like home-based telepresence via systems like Microsoft Kinect--have emerged since the introduction of ultra-high-end telepresence.

Even the word itself, telepresence, has pretty much come to mean "high-def video conferencing," not necessarily connoting the full immersive experience that Cisco promoted with its original systems.

My guess is that Cisco would not be particularly troubled by this trend in immersive telepresence. For them, the game was always about beefing up traffic loads on networks that run on Cisco switches and routers; exactly what kinds of end systems generated that traffic was less important. Immersive telepresence was a splashy, fancy way to promote video at a time when Cisco needed that shot in the arm.

So this is really useful information from Wainhouse, and I encourage you to help them generate the next round of it for their 2011 survey. You can go here to take the survey.