Hewlett-Packard Development showcased its Halo studio in Taipei yesterday -- a videoconferencing system that enables multinational executives to talk to their business partners abroad.
"The Halo studio is a collaboration between HP and DreamWorks Animation, providing life-size and real-time video," HP corporate marketing manager Emily Chang (張紫珮) said.
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The world's largest computer maker said it would continue to double sales of Halo as it tries to gain market share from rival Cisco Systems Inc.
Hewlett-Packard has sold 140 of its Halo videoconference studios, each of which sells for about US$250,000, Darren Podrabsky, marketing manager for Halo, told reporters yesterday from Corvallis, Oregon, during a videoconference with reporters in Taipei.
Halo competes with Cisco's TelePresence in the video conferencing market, which was worth an estimated US$6.7 billion last year, researcher Global Industry Analysts Inc said.
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Hewlett-Packard last year signed a deal with Tandberg ASA, the world's second-largest teleconferencing provider, to make the two companies' systems communicate with each other.
"Every year we have doubled our install base and we expect to continue that kind of growth rate," Podrabsky said.
More than 30 percent of customers have also bought a US$40,000 server that makes Halo compatible with Tandberg equipment, he said.
HP has more than halved the cost of installation for its videoconference studios since the product was first released in 2005 at a cost of US$550,000 each.
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The Halo studio allows customers to communicate with users from three cities and countries in 150 languages, including sign language, she said.
While accelerating business decision-making, the Halo studio will also greatly reduce companies' travel costs.
"HP itself saved at least US$300,000 annually on travel by resorting to Halo studio," Chang said.
In addition to the 30 or so Halo studios that HP uses internally, Chang said 140 studios had been installed worldwide so far, which were being used by clients from 22 countries such as ABN AMRO Bank, AIG Financial Products Corp and PepsiCo.
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