Video MSPs and carriers offering telepresence and video managed services have a substantial conflict to address. For a couple of reasons, they define their world in a much smaller dimension than enterprise users think of. This gap, the Expectation-Service Gap is represented by the Venn diagram on the left.

Users think of their eco-system of customers, suppliers, potential customers, potential suppliers and coworkers. Naturally, they define that scope of expectation to communicate by the large green surface area labelled 'User Expectation.' It's a big domain and somewhat shiny since expectations are high. Users have been spoiled by the excellent quality and enormous reachability available in the modern global telephone network, which includes the mobile telephone network, is capable of reliably delivering connections between any of four billion persons today, and probably another two billion before the decade is out.

On the other hand, VMSPs and carriers, being engineering-types and not necessarily entirely sympathetic to users, think in terms of on-network and off-network. They think in terms of their own service limits which are defined by the little green area labelled 'Service Limits.' Service providers are generally bound by two constraints. One, the commercial constraints of their customers where they don't get paid to worry or do anything about things that haven't been specifically contracted for, and secondly, by physical limits of control, where they can't worry about things they cannot see on their network monitoring hardware and software.

These competing views are the setup for two disappointments and two perspectives on the Expectation Gap. Users are disappointed when their service providers cannot do what they expect, and service providers are frustrated that their service doesn't meet the user's expectations. So what's at the heart of the Gap?

In the past, the Gap was the experience. Frankly, it sucked. But, with the rollout (for completely different reasons) of inexpensive high speed networks, and the availability of high definition hardware the foundations are in place to close the experience dimension of the Gap. The Gap, from the user's perspective today is the inability to conveniently, automatically, securely and inexpensively connect via video or telepresence to any other user. The Gap from the VMSP's perspective today, is the inability to make money from greatly expanding the service limits envelope to reach many, many other users.

VMSPs have the wrong view. Instead of recognizing how a greatly expanded universe of potential connections increases the value of their service to their paying user, they worry about how they're going to get paid for enabling that extra value. They think they should be paid for enabling the equivalent of the 'long distance call' between two companies. They look to the roaming fees available to mobile operators and think that's the model for them. I'll get the other service providers' customers to pay me for access to my customers.

This is a delusion. Roaming is an anomaly unique to mobile service, that has been perfectly exploited by mobile operators to the chagrin of their customers. Mobile operators get to blame the other operator for such high roaming fees even though they get a share in the charge, and negotiated it. In the USA and through regulation in Europe, roaming is not the golden goose it once was. In the USA, it's free and in Europe roaming fees between countries are smaller and getting smaller through the intervention of the European Commission.

High prices for long distance is such an obsolete notion. In the early days of telecom, people overpaid for long distance so that the high costs of local networks could be quickly paid back to the investors who would then have an incentive to invest in building networks. That's why it was a protected monopoly. Technology and competition ultimately changed all that. Today, LD is free.

We've learned that the carrier participants in the Cisco TelePresence Exchange are gathering in Paris later this month to discuss economics and possible billing methods. In the coming days, I plan to blog more about the economics of Exchanges and perhaps offer some insights on how these questions should be addressed.

In collaboration with the Human Productivity Lab, Brockmann & Company have developed two reports that are like book ends. They're complimentary in that they go together. The Inter-Company Telepresence and Video Conferencing Handbook is available for free download (login required) and is a vendor-sponsored report. It reviews the issues, the technologies and provides a number of enterprise recommendations for improving your firm's inter-company telepresence and video conferencing experience.

The Inter-Company Telepresence and Video Conferencing Exchange Review is the industry's first comprehensive survey of the inter-company exchange service market. Although small in revenues, the Exchange service marketplace is critical for the continuing growth of the telepresence and video conferencing services and equipment markets. Like the telephone company operation of the first half of the 20th century, most inter-company sessions are established manually. We expect that to rapidly change as competition in these services drives innovation, lower prices and higher utilization.

The Exchange Review is not available for free download. The Exchange Review is available (starting Wednesday February 17, 2010) for a one-time subscription fee of $1,750. Between now and then, you can pre-order the Exchange Review by faxing in the order form described here. Pre-orders receive a 20% discount so you can reserve your copy of the report for only $1,400. Save $350!

Starting on Wednesday, you can order your specially licensed copy by completing a PayPal transaction which handles credit card transactions too.

Here we reveal an interesting take on the Cisco-TANDBERG merger and thought, not only should the company's logo change, but so should the slogan, "The Human Network." Maybe the better approach ought to be "Resistance is Futile."

It should come as no surprise that TANDBERG has figured out how to interoperate with Cisco TelePresence equipment. In a surprise (NOT) announcement, TANDBERG demonstrated telepresence interoperability between TANDBERG Telepresence and the Cisco CTS 3000. This is the first, non-Cisco (for a short time I believe) interoperability implementation that uses the Cisco-developed and released for free, interoperability method - Telepresence Interoperability Protocol.

Congrats to TANDBERG engineering for quickly implementing this and demonstrating it BEFORE the merger is completed.

Why Should TANDBERG Announce This Now, Before The Merger's Completed?

Here's a couple reasons:

1. TANDBERG needed to explain to TANDBERG customers that the flagship (and really cool) T3 Telepresence suite will survive the merger.

2. TANDBERG and Cisco needed to demonstrate a willingness to enable interoperability, a tactic sure to please the anti-trust regulators (in Europe) who may be wavering on granting approval for this deal. Of course, enabling TIP for Polycom would make the regulators feel even better, but that depends on Polycom more than on TANDBERG or Cisco.

I had a really interesting briefing the other day with Scott Colesworthy (left), an entrepreneur who has established a subscription services business using Vidyo technology. It was interesting on a couple of counts.

First of all, it was a 3-way desktop PC video session. I don't get a chance to participate in these every day, and those that I have done were tiny, maybe 20 FPS and not particularly excellent quality or only available on PCs. The Vidyo technology at the heart of Scott's service worked with both Mac and PC technologies. It's a thin client implementation of Scalable Video Codec technology and delivers excellent video and voice quality to any Mac or Windows PC. Every session involves a server, so some of the processing work can be loaded onto the server, but more importantly the normal hassles of firewall traversal are gone since the firewall thinks it's an http session originated by the user it is protecting. Ports are typically opened in the dynamic range by the firewall since the user originates them and traffic is destined for the server and back. Of course the most secure environments will block these ports, but a quick call to IT can open them for these purposes.

At the same time, the executive system hassles of home office firewall configuration are non-existent. I just had to click on a link to join the session at the right time and my browser (Safari) download the appropriate Java applet. Scott says the Java code will soon be replaced with a flash implementation that also loads into the browser. The easy to use controls at the top of the screen enabled voice-switching and maximum of eight users in a single session.

Secondly, it was to demo of Scott's service, called Soltrite. Here's a 3-screen shot of the desktop video conferencing solution in action. I was impressed by the quality of the image. No jitter, no pixelation, just clear, clean screens. We did experience a few service cutouts, but frankly some of those were of my own doing as I checked out the various controls of the application.

Soltrite also supports desktop sharing, but unlike Skype it can show the desktop and the speakers, so for a software product demonstration for example, the sales executive doing the demo can watch for customer visual feedback and can change the tone of the demo if they notice the customer is being inattentive, or has a question or wants to move the presentation along. Of course, these are a lot harder to do when the customer's on a video-less screen share.

This service costs only $29/month per meeting room. Soltrite also supports a concurrent session pricing model to where an enterprise subscribes to some maximum concurrent sessions. The central server manages the software download process to the browsers, supports bandwidth measurement, packet loss recovery technologies and session switching logic.