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Telepresence - the generic name given to high definition video conferencing technology - has been much hyped over the years however with the close eye now been given to corporate travel it is perhaps now coming into its own. In the past the technology has suffered from the twin evils of over-inflated expectation together with the under-delivery of constrained network capability.

The fundamental difference between telepresence and videoconferencing is that the former attempts to be an immersion experience. At this end of the market, which is served to varying degrees of capability by Cisco, Teliris, Tandberg and HP, solutions are sold as “suites” with the necessary technology installed in matching and furnished meeting rooms at various locations. Meeting participants sit at Board Room type meeting tables across from a co-ordinated array of wide HDTV screens that display the participants in the “elsewhere” end of the meeting in life size. Much effort is made to visually trick the here and there participants that they are actually staring at each other face to face, rather than face to face (amongst the here participants) and face to camera to screen to face to camera to screen (amongst the there participants).

And that perhaps is the greatest paradox of it all. Telepresence must use a LOT of gee-wizzery in order to achieve its ultimate goal of you not noticing it. Telepresence must first convince you that using it is as at least as easy and intuitive as meeting someone face to face for real. And that is before you even begin to use some of the technology value add features that several of the vendors now claim as features. The extra challenge here is that you can’t help but express a quiet “Wow” as you first enter any telepresence suite - its something about ten or so metres of high-def flat screen installed in a mood lit and paneled room that almost ensures such an utterance. This mustbe amongst the few technologies that ranks highly on the Wow-meter however it begs to be unseen if it is to succeed in being more than a very expensive and rarely used corporate executive toy.

In order to achieve such feats of invisibility vendors have gone to a lot of trouble with the technology - from network performance to camera technology to acoustic engineering to visual trickery. Underlying all that is generally a fair degree of understanding of the “human nature” aspects of how we communicate effectively as people. Effective telepresence solutions must ensure that eye contact is assured, that meeting participants on screen have a 3D look to them, and that sound levels are the same whether you’re addressing a remark to a person who is 2 chairs to your left or 15989kms away (Sydney to New York if you’re curious).

If telepresence solutions are to ultimately play a significant role in providing a viable alternative to regular corporate business travel several current problems must be overcome. For a start right balance needs to be struck between “Wow!” and “What technology…was there technology?”. Organising a telepresence call must be no more difficult than organising a meeting with your colleagues down the hallway, never mind being easier than booking a flight (and transfers, and hotels, and making sure that your toothpaste and shampoo is in 100ml tubes…). Telepresence vendors also must do more to engage with users to educate them on what types of communications work well using the technology, and which should rather be done face to face. I cannot imagine for instance that firing a staff member would be appropriately performed over telepresence - though we’ve heard reported cases of that being via SMS so it shouldn’t surprise anyone to hear it happens.

2009 may well be the year that telepresence comes of age. Corporates with extensive deployments have certainly pointed to the ability to achieve financial ROI for the investment in the order of a 10:1 saving on the costs as a result of avoided air travel. Therefore the financial justification should alone be enough to convince more organisations to examine its use. ThinkingString recommends that companies with extensive travel budgets revisit the technology as today’s experience is a far cry from that of only a few years ago. Just don’t be wowed when you walk into the room!

What a slippery and exciting ride its been during 2008 for oil prices. Just a few months ago the world was feeling dizzy from the heady fumes of $147 a barrel oil and petrol sniffing was becoming so expensive a habit it almost had the necessary exclusivity to become widespread among the rich and well heeled. Even the most loyal of Chelsea Tractor drivers began to be dazzled by the hypnotically spinning numbers at the petrol bowser as they filled their tank. “Peak oil” made it from the vocabulary of the conspiracy theorists to the business pages of the broadsheets and dire predictions were made regarding the availability and cost of fuel supplies. But just in time for Santa to refuel the sleigh, New York Crude has fallen to below $34 a barrel, lower than any time in the last four years.

The gleeful exclamations of those who continue to wish for a world awash in cheap and plentiful petroleum fuel sources can be heard even over the roar of the newly restarted four barrel Holly V8s. Not for them a future of restrained oil supply, just “business as usual”. Now if only Chrysler and GM weren’t under Congressional and Executive pressure to build girly electric cars, we could all go back to the nirvana that is a multi-tonne SUV’d future.

But is it fair to point to the current crashing of oil prices and assume that we are in fact back to the days of cheap energy? Firstly it is appropriate to recognise that OPEC is committed to a price well above the thirties, albeit they recognise that North of $140 might be good for the hip pocket in the short term, but it is globally economically unsustainable in the long term. The fundamental factors behind oil pricing are the same as any other commodity - the balance of supply and demand. Above $100 a barrel oil prices began to contribute to the economic drag that was already beginning spreading from other factors. Though OPEC made substantial noises that they would increase supply to stabilise the price the reality is that relatively little extra capacity was able to brought online, not helped by the fact that not all members of the cartel wanted to play the game as they were in it for the short term gains.

More influential were the speculators, whose trading created an additional detachment effect that further dulled OPEC’s ability to control prices through altering supply.

What of the future? OPEC’s inability to much increase supply flow actually lends support to the views of industry insiders such as Matthew Simmonds who cast doubts on the accuracy and truthfulness of the claimed remaining reserves of the Saudi (and other major worldwide) fields. The IEA continues to cast doubts on the ability for us to find further significant fields, and despite the “Drill, baby drill” bluster expressed during this year’s US election campaign, the reality is that exploration of new fields offshore of the US or in ANWR make little real difference to global supply levels.

Oil price is also a bit like a piece of elastic. Once stretched, it will never return to the same size again. Now that OPEC has seen that the world will go as far as $140+ before choking, they will not settle for a long term price of less than $50. Even they hear the warning bells ringing from the calls to decouple Western (read: USA) economic growth from Middle Eastern oil. Such efforts will take a decade or more before they are successful, but in the long term OPEC must realise that the days of taking trillions from Western pockets are drawing to a close. Best to suck out as much money while the wallet remains at all open.

OPEC is now attempting to again stabilise the price, this time upward. At an OPEC meeting this month, Saudi Arabian oil minister Ali al-Nuaimi again indicated he thought US$75 per barrel would be “fair and reasonable,” adding that anything lower could lead to more, not less, instability. Ali al-Nuaimi reportedly saying “When oil is priced lower, such as it is now, there will be less investment and less future supply”. We should need no clearer indication that OPEC will cut supply to keep prices high, and furthermore are signalling that any existing field capacity will require difficult, innovative, and increasingly marginally effective (translation: expensive) extraction methods.

Conclusion: The strategic approach is to recognise that the future does indeed require us to migrate off petroleum based energy sources as soon as possible.

Its becoming more and more common for retail shoppers to consider the providence of the fresh and packaged food they buy. From Fairtrade chocolate to Free Range chickens to Organic vegetables it is obvious that consumers have an increasing awareness of the importance of the upstream supply chain, and the methods and ethics applied in the manufacturing of the goods they purchase. In addition to the organic and Fairtrade labels, more and more attention is also now being given to “local” sourcing. Arguably this is a return to the traditional rather than an entirely new phenomena. In years gone by the choice of produce that was grown within a ten mile radius was more a reflection of what was on offer, rather than a deliberate lifestyle choice. Now however, it is being recognised that economically and environmentally, it makes sense to purchase products that are grown and manufactured in the local region.

Outside of the kitchen we use high-falutin’ terms like “long tail, highly distributed supply chains” to refer to the process of sourcing the components that go into various manufactured goods from a range of different countries, the shipping back and forth during the build phase, and the eventual shipping of the finished product to a distant market. All that shipping around the place adds to the environmental footprint of a manufactured product - potentially adding another two and half sizes to the existing environmental footprint of a product, no matter how careful is the thought that goes into the product design and component choices.

In the data centre and across the office computing estate it will become increasingly important to focus on the embodied environmental footprint of the product. Right now most of the industry noise is on the energy consumption during the in-use phase of the product’s life. However where a product is designed and built and from what components, and how it is packaged and shipped will increasingly become a consideration as the buyers of IT equipment become more sophisticated in their understanding of the true meaning of “sustainability”.

It’s worth it therefore to consider the credentials of local, specialised PC and Server manufacturers. All other things being equal (price, performance, reliability, warranty and other features) a locally built and sourced item of hardware may well turn out to be a better choice in overall sustainability terms. While no-one ever got fired for buying Lenovo/Dell/HP/etc, it may just be a smarter choice to look beyond the usual crop of 800 pound gorilla box shippers.

Shop local…live light…

ThinkingString has moved to a new hosting provider to enable the migration of the site onto a WordPress platform. Hope you like the new look and feel, which has been chosen to be clean and uncluttered. The new platform allows us to keep the site content far more dynamic, and as things settle down the blog will be regularly updated with (hopefully) useful and interesting content.

The migration is however not without some challenges for us, in that existing content must be manually moved over. All that will take place over the coming weeks - possibly interrupted by that little pesky day called Christmas.

In the meantime, suggestions and comment welcome..