Telecom Industry Stalwarts Ally To Form Global Meeting Alliance

Tata Communications, together with nine global service providers, today announces the launch of the Global Meeting Alliance, an open ecosystem of leading telecom providers that have aligned to interconnect their respective business video communities. 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. The launch represents the largest functioning global collaboration between service providers in business video services.

Peter Quinlan, Vice President, Integrated Business Video Services, Tata Communications, said, “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. 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.”

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The Global Meeting Alliance network allows any service provider to connect to enterprises and institutions on all major continents, irrespective of service provider, following a similar business model to the airline alliance networks. Leveraging Tata Communications’ industry-leading 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. In addition, the community will engage in a collaborative approach to solve shared-industry challenges with the central objectives of making business video available globally, simple to connect and affordable for all.

“This is a major step forward for the video conferencing industry and its customers,” said Andrew W. Davis, Senior Partner and Co-Founder of Wainhouse Research. “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. With its history of wholesale network services, intercarrier experience, and public room support, Tata Communications is in a unique position to launch this alliance.”

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. Meetings are either initiated directly by the Global Meeting Alliance conference production team or by the end user who dials a meet-me access number and enters the PIN provided by the scheduling system. 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.