Tata Communications and nine other telecom leaders (including Telstra and Sprint) pledge their commitment today to interconnect their business video communities – driving global cross-network collaboration.
Tata Communications and nine other telecom leaders form Global Meeting Alliance
The Global Meeting Alliance is an open ecosystem that allows any service provider to connect to enterprises and institutions on all major continents, irrespective of carrier, following a similar business model to the airline alliance networks.
Peter Quinlan, Vice President, Integrated Business Video Services, Tata Communications, highlighted his company’s commitment towards “… facilitating an open, global ecosystem that moves business video from an intracompany experience to a collaboration tool with worldwide reach.”The community aims to solve shared-industry challenges to make business video available globally, simple to connect, and affordable for all.
The launch represents the largest functioning global collaboration between service providers in business video services.
Launch members include Safaricom in Africa, Telstra in Australia, Etisalat, Qtel and Mobily in the Middle East, Neotel in South Africa and Sprint, Glowpoint and TELUS in North America.
Leveraging Tata Communications’ large number of intercarrier agreements, customers of the Global Meeting Alliance members now have access to an international Telepresence network of 3rd party video endpoints, as well as the largest global public Telepresence room network consisting of 40 public Telepresence suites in 20 countries.
“By making B2B calls easier and by interconnecting different carriers, the Global Meeting Alliance will drive the usage of videoconferencing and Telepresence systems, enabling customers to see faster and higher returns on their investments,” says Andrew W. Davis, Senior Partner and Co-Founder of Wainhouse Research.The Global Meeting Alliance will simplify the launch and operation of business video worldwide, making it more affordable and enabling service providers to optimise their regional networks to interconnect with a global network and conferencing infrastructure maintained by the Global Meeting Alliance operator.
A standard set of processes and guidelines are applicable for service delivery and operations for all Alliance members.
In addition, common customer services tools will be used to schedule, conduct and provide support for video meetings.
This will reduce the complexity of usage for the end user and ensure that a standardised approach and quality is adhered to by the Alliance.
To participate in global meetings the end user or their Global Meeting Alliance service provider leverages a centralised scheduling system to book business video conferences with any other certified organisation.
Easier virtual global meetings for the user.
All meetings are enabled by a carrier-grade global video platform with infrastructure in four geographically diverse locations.
The Global Meeting Alliance service providers have integrated their services with the Global Meeting Alliance inter-company system which enables customers to book and launch meetings with end-users that are not directly served by the same service provider.
The service supports video business sessions that can include SD, HD and Immersive devices from the Cisco, Tandberg and Polycom product lines.
Tags: Cisco, Etisalat, Global Meeting Alliance, Glowpoint, GMA, Mobily, Neotel, Polycom, Qtel, Safaricom, Sprint, Tandberg, Tata, Telstra, TELUS
[…] their inter-enterprise video exchanges. Earlier this year, Tata Communications had joined the Global Meeting Alliance – an open business video ecosystem which provides participating enterprises and service […]