Managed Video as a Service

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Cisco announced they are investing $100M in product development, service and support for businesses with fewer than 100 employees.  Part of this investment includes the formation of a new business unit called the small business technology group.  You can see this groups new website at “Cisco Services of Small Business”. There you can find a link that helps you find Cisco powered service providers.

It’s not clear to me if this is simply repackaging and re-organizing of existing products.   Cisco merged channel partner programs between Linksys and Cisco brands very recently and perhaps this is related to that activity.     (As an engineer, it always amazes me how much one can spend simply changing the part numbers for products.  :) )

The announcement does claim that new Cisco Small Business products are scheduled to be available in December 2008 and will be focused on video surveillance, data storage and wireless office communications.

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David, @BTR said, November 23rd, 2008 at 1:45 pm

Business video applications, such as entry-level TelePresence, is one of the more promising areas of SMB growth. Also, the availability of Managed TelePresence Services in particular.

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dloher said, November 26th, 2008 at 8:26 pm

The two biggest issues I've seen over the years for Telepresence / video conferencing in business is the high cost of the equipment and high complexity (read, expensive) of maintaining and operating the systems. The second is that many (maybe most?) people are adverse to having a camera pointed at them. The only product I've seen that comes close to making video conferencing lost cost enough ($25-$100 webcam) and easy enough is Skype. There are no protocols or firewall port forwarding, etc, to setup. Perhaps a managed or "hosted" Telepresence will help lower the costs and ease of using video conferencing.

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