Cisco dives into top end conferencing

There's been much excitement at the ZDNet newsdesk today after Cisco revealed it would make a renewed play into video conferencing.

Seems Cisco's existing conferencing partners Polycom, Tandberg and Sony may not be too happy about Cisco's attempts to go it alone - all the kit from today's TelePresence announcement has been developed in-house - it's quite some departure from Cisco's buy-it-in strategy of the past few years.

The price of Cisco's kit has raised a few eyebrows - at £160,000 (OK - Cisco would rather we said $300,000 as it doesn't talk in sterling) it really is top end stuff.

I was briefed this morning by Cisco and any questions around cost were met dismissively.

No-one is turning it down on cost grounds, Cisco's unified comms director Clive Sawkins told me, although he admitted jokily that several customers had asked for a discount.

This is not to say it isn't good kit. In fact, the technology is impressive.

This morning's one-hour briefing was carried out using the TelePresence equipment, and it was pretty much like being in the same room - as long as you can tolerate a little latency.

The audio was spot on and the video quality impressive.

But at £160,000, we're still waiting for confirmation of names of businesses who have actually bought it.

We've asked Cisco, we know there is one anonymous customer, but as far as real names are concerned, we're still waiting...