Before You Buy Cisco Telepresence Have You Tried SightSpeed?

Have you looked at the price of Cisco's Personal Telepresence that was announced today?

$33,900 USD per seat

That's 22 years worth of SightSpeed For Business for a ten (10) seat pack.

Granted SightSpeed is my agency's client, but let's get real and think about value and the budget. For every $33,900 a company can have hundreds of people inside the company using SightSpeed in the work place versus one glamour puss (CEO). Of course the IT director won't get fired for buying Cisco, but if they tried SightSpeed to see how much use the video conferencing solution really receives they can quickly do some back of the napkin math to determine need and value to the company.

Oh. And here's one more point. SightSpeed keeps getting better and improving what they do. All I'm seeing is that Cisco is carving up their Telepresence technology, as it drops down in price.

One has to really wonder if there's that much difference in IP communications that's worth an almost 300x investment when prices of technology always drop with each next generation of release. For me, the cost of Telepresence just don't make sense (and I'm a Cisco shareholder and fan) given the ease of use, and low cost of a high quality service like SightSpeed already being on the market, plus having an award winning and proven track record clearly makes it a more than worthy option to consider.

Candidly, if I was the CFO of a company thinking of making the Telepresence investment, I'd at least want to SEE the comparison between the two with my own eyes before forking over $33,900 dollars for ONE SEAT versus $19.99 a month per seat.