Editor's Blog: The big picture

Yesterday I found myself out at Bedfont Lakes, near Heathrow, at Cisco's offices. I was there to check out that vendor's new videoconferencing system, TelePresence.

(As a complete aside, as someone who had the misfortune to grow up about five minutes' drive away from that location, it's incredible to see the offices of three tech giants right there - IBM and SAP as well as Cisco. It's a bit sterile but nonetheless a sign of progress for the area.)

But back to TelePresence. It's an impressive experience. It's not for the faint-hearted, at hundreds of thousands of dollars or pounds per room, per location, but the ROI figures can stack up, if you happen to be an organisation where there are large amounts of business travel. There's even an argument that the public sector could benefit from it. I fully expect top politicians and civil servants to want this facility.

To get an idea about the scope of the thing, check out the Cisco.com homepage, where there are some cheesy videos.

Sadly I wasn't permitted to take any photos, which was a strange omission from the day.

I did get to talk briefly to Cisco's CMO. As someone who wrote about the subject of tech and its marketing and advertising for a couple of years in this column, I'm fascinated by what this type of person has to say.

She came across as one of those formidable Silicon Valley execs and was, among other things, open about the company's approach to product placement. For example Cisco has managed to get TelePresence into an edition of new Fox TV show Vanished - "Patch me in via Cisco" one of the characters says, all with a very straight face, naturally - but it was the description of a firewall in an early episode of 24 that always made some of the silicon.com team roll around laughing.

"How do you get them to say what you want?" I asked her.

"We just go in and brief them, educating them," she said.

Pretty good briefing, from Cisco's point of view, I thought, though she admits programme makers don't always say it the Cisco way.

Still, you can see how getting something like TelePresence to look cool is worth the effort.

Today we wrote about how Cisco's offering in this space will stack up against HP's Halo service. It's a product versus service contest, as well as one based on technological approaches, and both will end up going up against others. But it's an interesting market. I couldn't honestly perceive much of a difference between either offering, having been in demos of both.

Of course, when the subject of which vertical industry sectors are adopting this high-end conferencing came up, in leisure what was mentioned were virtual box seats at sports events. Fair enough. But as an attendee was overheard saying out at Bedfont Lakes, when the adult industry gets in on the act, you know this type of thing has arrived.

In other news, I'm at the 2006 Financial Services IT Summit today, at the Great Eastern Hotel in London. Looks like some interesting speakers lined up, many of them CIOs that silicon.com aims to speak to often. I should remind everyone at this point about silicon.com's Financial Services section.

But I'm distracted as the day starts - I just got an email from the 'Government News Network', a daily source of on-diary events and announcements the government has planned. Only a media call today at 1:00PM from the DTI tells me about the first UK Nanaoforum. Is that English? Is that a typo? Am I missing something?