Jerry Boezel, vice president of channel strategy and marketing for global services, said Nortel made a conscious decision not to be in the equipment business itself. Rather, the company is partnering to let Tandberg and Polycom do the actual deployment, building and manufacturing the physical devices that make up the telepresence platform. Nortel is purely focused on making it work.

“We didn’t develop it as a product business as such; we developed it as a service business,” Boezel said.
“Inside Nortel, it is owned by and driven by global services. We have made a conscious position not to want to be in the equipment business ourselves.”

Boezel has seen other companies go down this path and get stuck because they want to scale their platform but lacked the resources or simply the confidence in their undertaking. With scale comes increased complexities and an increased need for management. As an open-source platform, Nortel customers can also integrate equipment from multiple vendors. Nortel’s system involves teaming up with a vendor to integrate a variety of technologies, even those from propriety telepresence provider Cisco, to pick and choose the best method.

“We are now past the big roadblock where everyone is saying it doesn’t really work and it’s complex and [they’re] not convinced of the security,” Boezel said. “Now, every customer at every level is convinced it’s very secure, high performance -- that roadblock is just flattened. The other was product availability. The ecosystem that we chose – to go down that route – is really the success formula.”

Jude agreed that telepresence/video conferencing has a lot of resonance with companies wanting to reduce travel costs. Considering the amount of overhead that comes along with the most attractive telepresence system, a managed services system could have the potential to simplify things. If companies want the virtues of video conferencing without the overhead concerns, managed service providers make the most sense, he said.

“We are seeing increased interest, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into building fairly gold-plated infrastructure,” Jude said. “It is more, ‘Ok, can we do meeting by video rather than moving people around and maybe just having a screen there and having audio conferencing associated with it. Maybe that is good enough. ’”