Derrick Buckley

On Friday, Sydney had a bus strike and this really hampered my travel to work. Unfortunately…..in the pouring rain, I had to attend work as I had some TelePresence meetings scheduled with colleagues in New Zealand.

Based on our deployment of TelePresence, I had no choice but to attend the office to provide me with the flexibility of not travelling to New Zealand for meetings. This really hammers home that point that Unified Communications solutions must be flexible enough for “in-transit”, “away” or home users and that a Meeting Room to Meeting Room solution has some huge limitations.

The trade off is that I will not get the TelePresence experience from my netbook or tablet but it will provide me with a more flexible solution. the TelePresence experience is really good and I spend at least 4-5 hours a week in TelePresence suites conducting meetings with my colleagues in Auckland.

Will this drive Hybrid Solutions? Execs could TelePresence for high profile meetings and true mobile users or home users will use Office Communications Server as it is potentially a far cheaper flexible solution? This means maintaining two different conference solutions and two totally different experiences for VC users.