Submitted by Eileen Haggerty, NetScout Director of Product Marketing
So I was catching up on my technology reading over vacation last week and stopped to read Mike Fratto’s Information Week article “Face to Face, But Miles Apart” – it was a review of the New LifeSize products introduced to help companies cost-effectively deploy telepresence solutions, sometimes referred to as, high-definition videoconferencing.
It first caught my attention because it was about LifeSize, and NetScout’s booth at Interop Las Vegas this past May was across the aisle from LifeSize. As I was often in this corner of our booth giving demos and talking with IT professionals, I couldn’t help but occasionally look over at their screens promoting sessions back to their headquarters. I have to say, I was impressed by the quality of the sessions!
As I spoke with the booth staff from LifeSize, I was interested to hear some important statistics – certainly, they offered solutions well delivered over T-1 segments (1.5 MB of available bandwidth), as described in Mr. Fratto’s article. However, they pointed out the advantages and cost implications of their solutions – yes lower bandwidth dependencies, but still high definition capabilities.
I was well aware that other telepresence solutions range in bandwidth consumption from 5MB to over 15MB of bandwidth depending on the definition of the session. It is important to note these are based on two-way sessions. Often, multiple endpoints are involved in a session – this will of course change the total bandwidth at each location consumed by the telepresence sessions. The folks at LifeSize were quick to point out, equipment costs are fixed – one time investments. But that choice impacts the contract for bandwidth required to support it – and that is an ongoing monthly expense – what could you do with $30,000 every month???? That can easily represent the type of monthly cost differentials you can discover as you investigate these implementations.
Telepresence peaks my interest these days -- late last year after a fall 2007 survey regarding what’s hot in business technologies conducted by industry analyst Jim Metzler of Ashton Metzler Assoc. demonstrated that telepresence and video conferencing are “hot” initiatives this year for many IT organizations (“What’s hot: IT Impact Brief by Jim Metzler”). Based on these results, we collaborated on another survey this spring focused directly on this subject of nearly 400 enterprise network managers. It revealed that 85 percent of respondents’ organizations either use, or plan to use video conferencing and 41 percent either use or plan to use telepresence. More of the findings are being discussed in Mr. Metzler’s July and August IT Impact Briefs.
I have really focused in on the bandwidth impact of telepresence in this blog entry – why? You may ask - because of the monthly expense impact it can affect principally - but also because NetScout solutions can really help roll out such a project. We have talked about project management lifecycles in previous blog entries and I firmly recommend such an approach to organizations now investigating just such an implementation. Not only will it help in the area of capacity planning, but also, in validating QoS class assignments, troubleshooting degradations, and analyzing impact on other applications in the same network.
If you would like to share your thought or experience with telelpresence, please feel free to post.
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