TIP Of The IcebergTIP Of The Iceberg

For this market--the visual communications market--to happen, there should be a high level of interoperability--between telepresence vendors and between telepresence and video conferencing systems.

TIP is Cisco's Telepresence Interoperability Protocol. Up until 2009, this protocol was proprietary, and implemented only in Cisco's Telepresence products, with no real connectivity to the rest of the market, telepresence or video conferencing.In January 2010, and in correlation to the Cisco-Tandberg merger, Cisco announced that it will release their TIP protocol and push it as an open standard. While that is a nice initiative and a positive step forward, it is only the TIP of the iceberg.

Telepresence interoperability means that telepresence systems interoperate with the rest of the market, not just with a few telepresence systems that chose to implement the standard (proper disclosure: RADVISION licensed the TIP standard). For this market--the visual communications market--to happen, there should be a high level of interoperability--between telepresence vendors and between telepresence and video conferencing systems.

You already know what I think about the ROI of telepresence systems. In order to increase this ROI to a point it really makes sense, a video collaboration solution should, in my opinion, be all-encompassing. It is enough that we still have video communication islands between companies, but having telepresence vendors, or even the telepresence market, as an additional island is not much better.

And it's not that complicated. After all, telepresence is almost the same as video conferencing these days. In terms of resolution, bandwidth, codecs--it's pretty much the same. There shouldn't be any reason not to fully connect all of the available means of visual communications into one.

My rule of thumb? If you are developing a video communication solution today, you need to make sure it interoperates with the rest of the video market--not only with a narrow niche.

For telepresence to really be worth it, ROI calculators aside, it should interoperate with video conferencing room systems and desktop solutions, bring down the boundaries of the room system and allow people to communicate wherever they are and however works best for them.

And if the telepresence vendors don't go there themselves, because of numerous reasons that have to do with marketing, differentiation or just lack of understanding of market needs, then maybe the solution has to arrive from the infrastructure, that will properly bridge all the different vendors and flavors into one unified experience of visual communication.

So yes--TIP is a nice step forward, but it is hardly a solution--at least not a full solution.For this market--the visual communications market--to happen, there should be a high level of interoperability--between telepresence vendors and between telepresence and video conferencing systems.