We hear a lot from Cisco these days about TelePresence (hey its even a gag in 30 Rock now) vs HP Halo… but what about Skype Video?
Expectations are set high with Cisco Telepresence. You have to use one of their offices, so its a managed environment. Quality of service is a given. As chair of SAP’s Sustainability Stakeholder Panel I was recently invited to Cisco’s offices in London to attend a meeting with the Panel, and SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann-Snabe. You can imagine my disappointment when the system just didn’t work. Even worse – and how is this for unfortunate? – one of the panel members flew from their location to SAP’s Philadelphia office for the TelePresence meeting. Ah yes – sustainability and telepresence… Suffice to say the outcome was pretty embarrassing. Maybe Tim can make something funny out of it. TelePresence is utterly amazing- it really is like being in the room with the other folks on the call- when it works properly. And yes this was nothing but a configuraton issue. I am on the record as being bullish about Cisco’s Video Revolution.
In contrast see the zero expectations Skype Video, which saved us a lot of pain and money recently. You see- I was one of the organisers of the NoSQL EU show, which was scheduled bang smack in the middle of the Ash Cloud. We were worried about what to do – refunds, or whatever, given that some of our speakers wouldn’t be able to get here from the USA. Someone (it could well have been me) suggested we use Skype Video for the presentations…
(Read the full article @ James Governor's Monkchips)
