Cisco Unveils HealthPresence 2.5, Connected Health to Aid Collaboration

 

Cisco has announced HealthPresence 2.5 and the global availability of Connected Health to boost telehealth collaboration.

Cisco has unveiled a new version of its HealthPresence platform and global availability of its Connected Health services, two products the company says will help with care efficiency and Collaboration.

Announced on Jan. 17, HealthPresence 2.5 allows health care organizations to build a scalable, flexible telehealth network, according to Cisco.

HealthPresence integrates high-definition video and medical devices and allows physicians in a remote location to assess a patient's condition. Version 2.5 will enable organizations to customize their telehealth platforms, Cisco reported.

"Customers are looking for new models for health care while protecting health information," Kathy English, senior director of public sector and health care marketing at Cisco, said on Jan. 16 at the virtual Cisco Connected Health Roundtable.

 

Laws such as the Affordable Care Act are impacting the ability of health care providers to deliver new models of service, according to English.

 

New features in HealthPresence include standards-based connectivity to third-party medical devices. The platform allows hospital staff to connect driverless USB, S-Video and composite-based medical devices.

In addition, HealthPresence now includes standards-based video conferencing. Providers can use any endpoint that supports Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)/H.323 video standards.

Endpoints may include the Cisco VX Clinical Assistant cart, the 42-inch TelePresence MX200 system, or the TelePresence SX20 featuring a camera and screen.

"Customers wanted to be able to use it on furniture, use their own endpoint—an endpoint like Cisco's telehealth [systems], perhaps Polycom's or perhaps an iPad and bring in video through Jabber," said English.

Providers can use their own IT staff or a Cisco Certified Partner to install HealthPresence, the company reported.

"Cisco HealthPresence 2.5 offers our customers incredible flexibility to build the right solution for their telehealth initiatives," David Plummer, global business leader for Cisco HealthPresence, said in a statement. "By unbundling the solution and offering Cisco HealthPresence software as a stand-alone offering, Cisco now enables customers to build telehealth networks using the hardware that best suits their needs."

The company also announced Cisco Services for Connected Health and Cisco Architectures for Connected Health. The services allows health care parties such as doctors, patients, clinicians, authorities and health insurance companies to Collaborate in a video conference.

These products include Cisco Advisory Services for Connected Health, which provides guidance to health care organizations on identifying objectives, business requirements, return on investment and use cases.

"The advisory service will allow you to identify where some of the challenges are in your care setting or customers' care settings and identify where there are areas of improvement," said English.

Meanwhile, Cisco Security Services for Connected Health provides analysis of health organizations' security requirements and uses a standards-based approach to identify gaps in policies and processes.

"Security is top of mind, whether it be from an application perspective, cyber or Internet access capabilities or whether it be security in general around HIPAA [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act], " said English.

Another component, Cisco Architecture Assessment Services for Connected Health, identifies health care organizations' needs and evaluates network infrastructure, security, mobility and storage. "The architecture assessment for Connected Health will enable customers to deliver on the concept of the smart hospital," said English.

Optimization Services for Connected Health help a health care organization manage total cost of ownership and Cisco Pilot, Design, Implementation (PDI) Services for Connected Health provides a way to develop a detailed design for pilot implementations.

"All of these [Connected Health products] are brought together through a managed set of services that will truly allow you to address customer challenges," said English.

 

Cisco Showcases Growth in Cloud Collaboration and Announces New Collaboration Capabilities and Services for Enterprises, Service Providers and Partners

 

At its Collaboration Summit Cisco unveiled enhancements to its collaboration portfolio by: (1) bringing into its Hosted Collaboration Service (HCS) both TelePresence bridging and many of the capabilities of Cisco Unified Communications Release 9.0; and (2) extending Cisco WebEx to the Private Cloud. The offering of feature parity between premise and cloud gives customers more flexibility in their UCC consumption choices. And partners will be provided with additional “as-a-Service” revenue opportunities via the HCS enhancements to grow their business, as well as an expanded addressable market through the new way to deploy WebEx for those customers who prefer an on-premise solution.

Expanding Cisco HCS

New HCS technologies are targeted for global availability in Q4 CY 2012.

Extending TelePresence Capabilities in HCS

The HCS solution with TelePresence Exchange (CTX) integrates a shared multitenant media solution for video to enable a “static bridge” service option, also known as “rendezvous conferencing,” for secure B2B services for video and telepresence. The service creation platform offers simplified management and coordination of media resources, configurable service levels, and open application programming interface (API) for further service customization. This solution enables partners to extend their hosted UCC service portfolios to include telepresence as a service. Through the integration of CTX with HCS, customers have the ability to connect multiple locations, including external vendors and suppliers, at the same time. Via the hosted model, customers simply buy or lease the endpoints and the partner provides the backend technology.

Bringing Cisco Unified Communications Release 9.0 Capabilities into HCS

Cisco is extending many of the latest Cisco UC capabilities announced earlier this summer to the cloud via HCS.

 

Contact Center integration:Through HCS enhancements for Customer Collaboration, partners can easily manage multiple contact centers for customers. Additionally, HCS partners can arm customers with a highly-customizable Web 2.0 collaboration desktop that puts relevant information that call center agents need in a single, modifiable cockpit. Agents can use this information to assist callers faster, better, and with greater accuracy.

 

Extend and Connect: Controlled by Jabber and enabled by Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) 9.0, Extend and Connect brings third-party phones into the Cisco UC environment. This feature offers those enterprise customers migrating to CUCM 9.0 an opportunity to leverage their existing investments further without compromising the ability of their employees to benefit from new UCC capabilities. In addition, telecommuters and business travelers can initiate a Jabber session on their PC device, input the phone number of their preferred voice device, and have CUCM route all voice traffic directly to that phone number while all the call control remains anchored in the Jabber client. In this way a knowledge worker can initiate a conference call from home, for example, with office features and billing associated with his/her office phone.

 

Extend and Connect operates on signaling and call control data, not VoIP, so it requires no Quality of Service (QoS) and is bandwidth stingy. That means users will be able to leverage the Cisco UC environment despite slow or unreliable connections, including those sometimes found in cafes, hotels, and home offices. Jabber is a software client and includes IM/P, voice, voice messaging, video, desktop sharing and conferencing.

 

Connecting the dots between enterprise and mobile networks:With IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) integration capabilities, Cisco HCS partners can offer Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) capabilities to their customers. This helps mobile service providers connect enterprise and mobile networks, offering seamless services between the two. This offering also enables operators to provide voice over 4G data networks.

Cisco WebEx Meetings Server

Cisco WebEx Meetings Server, targeted for global availability in Q4 CY 2012, is an on-premise version of WebEx that gives customers the capability to run WebEx out of their own private cloud datacenter. It’s a full collaboration solution including WebEx clients for PC, Mac, iPhone and iPad; high quality video; desktop sharing, annotation, and collaboration tools; recording and playback. Integration with Cisco’s UC suite that extends IP telephony to conferencing, and provides escalation from a Jabber IM session to a full WebEx meeting directly from the Jabber client is targeted for availability January, 2013. As subsequent releases come out, other mobile devices will be added and movement to HD video will occur.

What This Means to You

To Customers: Collaboration Summit places a lot of emphasis on giving customers choice in the way that they deploy collaboration solutions – be that private cloud, public cloud or hybrid.

For example, those customers who purchased CUCM 9.0 as a premised-based solution can now actually have those services deployed in the cloud as well via HCS.

 

Then, there are customers who are very sensitive to data privacy and are just unwilling to trust cloud-based solutions. In addition, there are some markets where the regulations are such that cloud-based WebEx is not a viable solution. Or you’re in the part of the world where a cloud-based solution is infeasible. And there are still customers who want to have the choice between a CapEx model and OpEx model. These are customers who are willing to say, "look, I’ll pay the CapEx upfront and run it myself. I think I can save more money that way, than going to the Opex model." The WebEx meeting server announcement serves these types of markets.

 

To Partners: Cisco has been very focused about putting partners at the center of its cloud strategy. Last month Cisco announced the Master Cloud Builder Specialization that offers elite branding, deeper engagement with Cisco sales teams and financial incentives. At Collaboration Summit Cisco will be discussing with partners what they’ve done to make WebEx resale viable and the new WebEx Advanced Technology Partner (ATP) specialization that will be available for them as well. The WebEx ATP specialization is for partners who are actually incorporating WebEx into their own offerings.

 

The total WebEx addressable market will likely increase because partners can now get to those customers who historically were not willing to embrace a cloud-based web conferencing solution.

Through the integration of CTX into HCS, partners can more efficiently manage the infrastructure necessary to enable TelePresence and videoconferencing, while also leveraging that infrastructure across their entire customer base. This enables partners to avoid making separate infrastructure investments for each customer. In addition, this solution enables partners to extend their hosted UCC service portfolios to include telepresence as a service.

 

Cisco is also expanding HCS by bringing in many of the capabilities of CUCM 9.0 including the video and customer collaboration. This opens new ways for partners to create recurring revenue streams because it offers multiple insertion points. Partners will now be able to approach customers by helping them initiate their contact center and then upsell them with upgrades to their UCC infrastructure. The fact that Cisco can now offer feature parity between premise and cloud, so customers don’t have to make a choice when they pick a deployment model is a big attraction point for partners.

 

Huawei Targeting Cisco in Telepresence Market

 

The networking competition between Cisco and Huawei is now moving into the immersive video conferencing space, where Huawei is looking to displace Cisco as the top vendor.

Huawei Technologies, which already competes with Cisco Systems in the global networking market, reportedly is now looking to challenge Cisco in the telepresence space.

 

Cisco is the dominant player in the $2.8 billion immersive telepresence arena, leading other major rivals like Polycom. However, as Huawei looks to expand its capabilities beyond the networking business, telepresence is becoming a focus, Li Jun, general manager of such telepresence products at the Chinese vendor’s Enterprise unit, told Bloomberg News.

 

Huawei had about $200 million in sales of telepresence equipment in 2011, Li said.

 

Telepresence technology enables businesses to conduct conferences via video in an immersive fashion that gives participants the feeling of being in the same room, even though they may be across the world from each other. The equipment involved with telepresence systems can include not only the technologies, screens and cameras, but also furniture for the rooms.

 

Telepresence and other video conferencing technologies have gotten a boost in recent years as businesses look to increase employee productivity and improve the lines of communication with workers, partners and customers, while at the same time driving down travel costs. However, with the growth of such trends as cloud computing, bring your own device (BYOD) and greater workforce mobility, the video conferencing market is changing, with an increasing emphasis on software-based solutions and enabling video collaboration on a range of devices, including PCs and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

 

The uncertain global economy and reduced spending in the public sector are conspiring to slow sales of video conferencing solutions overall, and the market for immersive telepresence products is being particularly hard hit, according to analysts at IDC. In the second quarter, overall video conferencing spending fell 10 percent from the same period in 2011, while revenue in the multi-codec telepresence dropped fell 38.4 percent. Those numbers were a continuation of the trend seen in the first quarter, according to IDC.

 

“The high-end, immersive telepresence market has been taking a hit lately as lower-cost, HD-quality video solutions, along with a range of new video deployment options for customers, have emerged," Rich Costello, senior analyst for IDC’s Enterprise Communications Infrastructure business, said in a statement in May when announcing first-quarter market numbers.

 

Still, Huawei executives see telepresence technology as a key part of their plans to triple revenue to $100 billion by 2021, up from $32 billion in 2011. Huawei also is looking to push its way into other markets as well, including cloud computing and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

 

Li indicated to Bloomberg that Huawei will look to offer less expensive telepresence systems as it competes with Cisco. The company’s high-end telepresence offering, the TP3106, delivers high-definition images across three flat screens for about $160,000, while a similar system from Cisco could cost as much as $300,000 Li said.

 

Cisco executives have acknowledged Huawei as a strong rival in the networking space. In April, Cisco CEO John Chambers told The Wall Street Journal that he saw Huawei—rather than the likes of Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks—as its top competitor. That came after Huawei in 2011 launched an aggressive campaign to increase its presence in the North American market.

 

 

Cisco To Offer Subscription-Based Telepresence To SMBs Through Channel Partners

Cisco (NSDQ:CSCO) will offer subscription-based telepresence services to SMBs through the channel -- one of several video-related announcements the vendor plans to make Wednesday along with several new products in its TelePresence portfolio.

Among the new telepresence wares launching Wednesday are Cisco's MX300 -- a larger, 55-inch version of the MX200 endpoint Cisco debuted in July, offering 1080p at 30 frames per second video. Also new is a second generation version of its VX Clinical Assistant, a telemedicine-centric version of Cisco TelePresence offered to health care customers.

The big news for partners, however, is Cisco TelePresence Callway, which combines Cisco TelePresence endpoints with a subscription-based telepresence service hosted and managed by Cisco and sold through the channel. Callway service will start at $99 a month for SMB customers, a standard package that includes unlimited telepresence calling and data sharing. A premium version of the service, at $149 a month, adds higher resolution video.

Callway will work with Cisco's MX video systems, C40 codec, C20 quick set codec, and EX 60, EX90 and E20 video units, and Cisco customers can either buy or lease the endpoints. Cisco will also offer a service called MeetMe -- essentially a multiparty bridging capability that can support up to 12 callers -- for $349 a month.

U.S.-based Cisco channel partners will get first crack at selling Callway. Solution providers need to be Cisco Telepresence-certified in order to sell the product, according to Gina Clark, vice president and general manager in Cisco's TelePresence Cloud Business Unit.

In addition to the new endpoints and services, Cisco is also launching Jabber Video for Telepresence, a software client that customers can use to connect into Cisco telepresence meetings even if they don't have Cisco telepresence or other comparable endpoints. In essence, that participant can click on a link sent to them and then be able to do full instant messaging, voice and video capabilities using the Jabber client, which will work with Cisco's Video Communication Server (VCS) Expressway and the Callway services. It'll be released in beta in the first quarter of 2012, according to Cisco.

During a conference call for media and analysts earlier this week, Marthin De Beer, Cisco senior vice president and general manger, Emerging Business Group, said video overall is a $5 billion business for Cisco, but is expected to hit $18 billion over the next three years as interest in video increases. Cisco is investing approximately $1 billion in R&D related to video, said De Beer, who now manages all of its video businesses: consumer, enterprise and service provider.

Cisco's latest moves come as various competitors aggressively target Cisco's video dominance, from Polycom looking to bulk up its channel relationships, services opportunities and software strategy to smaller competitors like LifeSize Communications, Vidyo and a host of startups jockeying for video channel business. Other major vendors with substantial unified communications practices, such as Avaya, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) and Siemens Enterprise Communications, are also pushing video and its role in the broader UC and collaboration market.

Cisco's argument is that it's the only vendor to offer a full collaboration portfolio that touches everything from call control to video infrastructure and management capabilities. All of Cisco's collaboration endpoints, from Cius, its Android-based tablet, to its WebEx collaboration platform and its IP phones, are now video-enabled -- a point Cisco executives repeatedly emphasized during the media conference this week.

Cisco also now offers interoperability between its video products and those of other vendors that used standards-based protocols like H.323 and SIP, and as of November, all of its video products will have touch user interfaces.

Many of Cisco's recent product announcements address flexibility and easier management of video infrastructure; during its most recent telepresence product blitz this past July, for example, Cisco released the Cisco Telepresence Conductor, which can process multi-party conferencing request and automatically assign meetings to appropriate conference units -- meaning that telepresence meetings can be conducted on-the-fly, without so much pre-scheduling hassle.

O.J. Winge, senior vice president for Cisco (NSDQ:CSCO)'s TelePresence Technology Group, said Cisco Callway adds to Cisco's vision of offering telepresence to companies of all sizes. He and Clark both made reference to Callway being a third option for acquiring Cisco telepresence, on top of the TelePresence systems and endpoints it already sells to enterprises and the hosted TelePresence it offers through global service providers.

Winge said that Cisco doesn't think Cisco Callway will conflict with existing platforms like WebEx, which use video and are popular among small and midsized business users, but are more about collaboration than immersive video conferencing, he argued.

"What's important is the human relationship building -- the ability to have that in-person type of experience, and that's the clearly differentiating factor," said Winge in an interview with CRN. "I am looking at these tools as very complementary in terms of the ability to use them together."
There's enough room for both, Winge said; WebEx is a data-sharing collaboration platform that can involve video, whereas Callway and the telepresence endpoints offer the immersive conferencing ability where users can see life-size images of their colleagues.

"You'd use the WebEx capability to post questions and have a dialogue, but you wouldn't want that popping up on your telepresence screen and ruin the experience you're having there," he explained. "I believe these technologies will eventually blend into each other and create various use cases."

While the resale of video endpoints is less and less lucrative for VARs as video becomes more ubiquitously deployed technology, Winge said Cisco believes there will continue to be growth in integration and services opportunities for solution providers behind that ubiquity, especially as customers look to bring video into different lines of business. Revenue in Cisco's TelePresence business has been been growing 20 to 25 percent over the past few quarters, Winge said.

"Everyone is always afraid of cannibalization and partners are always saying, what is happening to my revenue stream going forward," Winge said. "I'd tilt the discussion to say that we're only just scratching the surface with the use of telepresence. How many people do you know that are exposed to telepresence on a daily basis? There is an enormous amount of growth in this space."

Winge also acknowledged the increasing role of service providers in video sales to small business and midmarket customers -- and the fear from some solution providers that with the coverage breadth the service providers have, those solution providers will be cut out of the market opportunity.
Cisco sells hosted telepresence through 14 of the major service providers, including AT&T, Verizon, BT and Tata, but according to Winge, the push by service providers into video is also creating partnership opportunities for traditional channel partners, too.

"You do see a lot of VARs that are are actually partnering with these service providers, and you also see a lot of M&A-type activity," Winge said. "We see it as both a threat and an opportunity [for VARs], but the reality of this business is that it's both an extraordinarily global business and an extraordinarily local business."

TelePresence turns 5! What's next for Enterprise Video

Didier Moretti, VP/GM of Cisco's Media Experience and Analytics business, discusses what's new in enterprise video with the recent Cisco TelePresence announcement on October 26.

Mobily Launches Saudi Arabia’s First Public Cisco TelePresence Suite

Facilities Now Available in Riyadh Offer a High-Definition Video Communication Tool for Businesses

Mobily, the official brand name of Etihad Etisalat and a leading mobile and data service provider in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, today unveiled the first public Cisco TelePresence Suites® venue in the Kingdom. The suite is centrally located in Riyadh city at the Mobily headquarters adjacent to Kingdom Tower.

Mobily’s Cisco TelePresence Suite will connect 32 worldwide business cities across five continents with its partner Tata Communication and other partner networks. The network reach makes Cisco TelePresence® technology a truly global collaboration tool.

Highlights / Key Facts

The new Mobily TelePresence facility will enable Mobily’s customers to minimize their travel time and expenses by delivering a live, immersive, face-to-face experience via the network.

Cisco TelePresence technology allows users to enjoy real-time communication and to collaborate with colleagues, customers and partners even if they are in a different city. Participants sit at a conference table in the Cisco TelePresence room and connect to the other participants with a simple phone call. The setup of the rooms allows participants to feel as if they are sitting across a table, in a life-size meeting room.

Customers will be able to purchase meeting slots in the Mobily TelePresence room, in advance, on an hourly or daily basis through Mobily interactive 24-hour online booking system with its partner Tata Communication.

The rooms have been installed with a Cisco TelePresence System 3010, which allows up to six people to connect simultaneously across a maximum of 48 locations. It comprises three 65-inch plasma screens and a specially designed physical table that sits six participants on each side of the virtual table. It also features an additional LCD display for sharing rich-media content and other data using simple collaboration functionality as well as integrated cameras, lights and microphones so that speakers use less power.

The ‘real life’ meeting experience provided by Cisco TelePresence technology is delivered through ultra-high-resolution video that reveals subtle facial expressions conveying nonverbal reactions. Spatial audio allows the transmission of every nuance of the conversation and participants to interact as they would in person.

The Mobily public TelePresence solution will help save time and costs as well as boost productivity by reducing or eliminating the need to travel, thereby facilitating a ‘greener’ environment by reducing the carbon footprint. It also offer increased flexibility to Mobily customers in the Kingdom, who will be able to conduct business meetings or sensitive negotiations.

The Mobily TelePresence suite in Riyadh will be connected to a number of other rooms around the globe as a Global Meeting Exchange. The Mobily Exchange will enable business-to-business meetings between any public rooms or customer-owned private rooms to communicate with each other.

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