The unique collaboration sees Tata Communications, headquartered in India, partner with 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 to interconnect business video communities. The partnership is designed to enable these operators from all quarters of the globe to connect to enterprises and institutions on all major continents, irrespective of domestic service providers.
“Tata Communications continues to demonstrate its commitment to facilitating an open, global ecosystem that moves business video from an intracompany experience to a collaboration tool with worldwide reach,” said Peter Quinlan, VP, integrated Business Video Services at Tata. “The Global Meeting Alliance is central to this strategy, and today, all alliance members are taking a major step towards making an open community for business video a reality.”
With numerous intercarrier agreements already in place, Tata says members of the Global Meeting Alliance will have access to an international telepresence network of third party video endpoints, the largest global telepresence meeting space, in addition to access to 40 public telepresence suites in 20 countries. Through collaboration, the alliance aims to make business video services more efficient and accessible to the smaller carriers and enterprise units through optimisation of region networks, before interconnecting globally.
Sprint’s Mike McRoberts, director of product management, expressed his delight at the company’s inclusion in the alliance. “With tremendous growth in business video, Sprint is committed to leveraging the Global Meeting Alliance and its open ecosystem foundation to deliver the benefits of a rich global collaboration experience to our customers.”
Other operators focused on the benefits such a platform will provide to domestic markets. “Many Canadian businesses rely on international communications to maintain their competitive edge, be with their remote offices with suppliers and customers,” said Tony Krueck, VP business products and services at TELUS. Marwan, Al Al Ahmdai, CBO at Mobily, said similar things about the Saudi Arabian market. “Saudi Arabia is home to many global companies that need to interact with different offices, partners and customers around the globe.”
