Cisco has announced two new TelePresence products, the Cisco TelePresence MX200 and the Cisco TelePresence Conductor, which it says are designed to make it easier for organisations to deploy videoconferencing.

“We are targeting the pervasive adoption of video we want to help companies do large-scale deployment of video,” Mr David Hsieh, Vice- President Marketing - Emerging Technologies, Cisco, told Business Line a few days ago. Mr Hsieh said that the MX200 could be installed by people with no technical expertise in around 15 minutes. “The product will be priced around $21,000, but the effective rate for most customers will be $10,000,” he said.

The company has also announced the TelePresence Conductor, which Mr Hsieh said would enable today's jet-set executives to use local resources more effectively. Providing a live example while he was in Bangalore before the product was released, he said that shortly after the meeting with this paper's reporter, he was going to have a video conference with other employees in Bangalore who sat in a different office. “Normally, you would expect the TelePresence to use the Bangalore infrastructure, but I'm based out of San Jose and my TelePresence settings are hard-wired to San Jose.”

This meant that the TelePresence traffic would have to travel to San Jose and back because the MCU (Multipoint Control Unit, a device used to bridge videoconferencing connections) is hard-wired to the user. Mr Hsieh said that once the TelePresence Conductor was made available, this problem would be solved because it created a cloud involving multiple MCUs.

“The upshot is that the TelePresence Conductor will ensure that the Bangalore MCU and not the San Jose MCU will be used.” Mr Hsieh said that this would ensure that resources were more effectively allocated and used.

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