Huawei goes after video stars

Huawei has launched its first full scale attack on telepresence giants Cisco and Polycom with an offering it claims will break down the barriers of telepresence adoption in Australia.

The company today flagged its foray into the market with Telepresence 2.0, a product designed to steal market share away from the two teleconferencing kings with its offering of 1MB per second bandwidth for full high-definition 1080p video and surround sound- 50 per cent less than the traditional 2MB per second industry standard. 

The push comes after Huawei Australia boosted its local staff count in an attempt to take on what one executive decribed as its “lazy competitors”.

In contrast, Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers recently spoke of his fear of Huawei as a rival at the company’s recent annual conference, describing Huawei as "a very tough competitor over the long term."

Head of the newly-established Huawei Australia Enterprise group Gavin Milton-White told CRN the company had intentionally positioned the product to undercut its rivals, by both bandwidth and a pricing structure which will see the staple TP3106 model for 3-6 users retail at $250,000. Cisco declined to comment on its pricing structure. However, earlier this year Polycom revealed that its high end 'immersive' OTX and RPX telepresence solutions were similarly priced.

“The take up of telepresence has been quite slow because of the associated costs, and the bandwidth is traditionally quite high and expensive,” Milton-White said. “What differentiates our product is the affordability and interoperability. We’re happy for customers who have made investments in Cisco products to retain them, but now we want you to look at Huawei products and start making investments, and we will work with incumbent Cisco components.”

Milton-White said the Huawei solution allowed up to 5 per cent packet loss without impacting on quality. The company is offering the TP3106 as well as two room-immersive systems for 6-14 users (TP3118S) or 6-18 users (TP3118) and three device-agnostic and interoperable systems.

Huawei's first local telepresence customer, university network operator AARNet has already connected three sites across Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. 

Huawei’s push into the teleconferencing market comes after the Federal Government's carbon tax legislation passed through the Senate. Milton-White said Huawei’s telepresence products would allow companies to reduce their carbon emissions by not travelling, and the company would look at specific calculations based on the proposed $23 per tonne carbon price over the coming year.

 “We’ll be looking very closely at how that impacts their own travel budgets, and as these companies investigate how they’ll be affected, we’ll be working with them to see how effective our offering is.”

Huawei is relying on its enterprise channel partners to push the new product, targeting business environments in the verticals of e-health, education and e-commerce, courthouses and emergency response.

Huawei goes walkabout

Huawei is also hoping that its telepresence solution will help to bridge the digital divide between mainstream Australia and indigenous communities to support the delivery of medical and other services.

“We want to take video to the indigenous population as well, bring e-commerce to those remote sites," Milton-White said.

"They are digitally excluded today: imagine sitting in a remote location where you can’t get to a doctor, we have the interoperability now where you can sit at an end point and talk to a GP to get that first line of support.”

Telepresence 2.0 is built on an open platform that can be integrated with existing unified communications systems, IP multimedia subsystems and traditional video conferencing systems.