The EX90 desktop-type system combines an HD camera and monitor with a desk phone that has a touchscreen for controlling the system. Even more portable is the Movi, which attaches a TelePresence camera to any laptop running a Windows or Mac operating system.
Cisco used its TelePresence technology to connect Cisco employees, customers, partners, industry analysts and reporters joining from global locations Tuesday to introduce the new offerings. While rivals such as Polycom and others have long offered videoconferencing and teleconferencing technology, Cisco raised the bar in 2006 with the introduction of TelePresence, which it called "immersive" videoconferencing in which the images were so sharp and life-size that participants who may have been time zones away appeared to be in the same room.
With its sizable marketing budget, Cisco got product placements on TV shows like the Fox network action-adventure series "24." Today, when anchors on MSNBC interview a guest at another site, they use Cisco TelePresence.
Cisco has been criticized over the years for offering a closed system in which participants on each end of a videoconference have to be on a TelePresence system. But Cisco says it has now come to realize that interoperability is essential for wider adoption of videoconferencing in the context of unified communications technology for collaboration among an increasingly globally distributed work force.
"I think there was some kind of initial criticism around Cisco's TelePresence systems about interoperability," acknowledges O.J. Winge, a senior VP of the TelePresence group. "In order to really define the experience, in order for people to get their arms around this type of technology, Cisco needed to push innovation quite hard, to give [users] a high-definition and in-person kind of experience. They pushed it so far that they broke interoperability in the first stage."
