TATA Communications launches Pay-Per-Use public rooms in Taj Hotels

Details: Category: Consumer Ecosystems; 17 November 2008; 7587 views

Tata Communications has announced the launch of its TelePresence rooms available for public use in the United States and United Kingdom, linking to additional public rooms in Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai, India...

The collaboration between Tata Communications and Cisco is the first managed telepresence service in the world to deliver public and private Cisco TelePresence rooms to companies globally. This new service will allow companies and individuals to use Cisco TelePresence for one-off meetings.

Tata Communications is working with Cisco, Taj Hotels owner, the Indian Hotels Company Limited, and the Confederation of India Industry (CII) to offer public telepresence facilities which are available for rent on an hourly basis. The first phase of public rooms was launched in India in July at the Taj Hotels in Mumbai and Bangalore, and CII offices in Bangalore and Chennai. Tata plans to make 100 rooms available globally by the end of 2009.

"With this innovative service offering, Tata Communications is not only adding value to its business and that of its customers, but revolutionising business altogether," said Tata Communications, Chief Operating Officer, Vinod Kumar. "This groundbreaking innovation enables our global customers to join a wider ecosystem of users via public access rooms allowing them to not only to communicate virtually in real-time but providing a cost-effective and eco-friendly solution."

The public room offering creates a larger network of interconnected rooms and expands the telepresence market to small and mid-sized businesses. Tata Communications' managed service offers a professionally run concierge service that handles reservations, scheduling, customer support, monitoring, management, reporting and billing capabilities. These services provide organizations with the ease and speed to deploy and manage highly collaborative tools more effectively. The public room offering is also certified as a world class network solution, which further helps ensure high levels of reliability and availability.

Cisco TelePresence provides life-like, high definition, conferencing facilities with superior audio, video and environmental qualities allowing participants to meet their colleagues, customers and business partners across a virtual table. Cisco TelePresence use also contributes towards a company's environmental responsibility, enabling it to lower overall CO2 emissions by reducing the need for travel.

Tata Communications has plans to open additional rooms in Hyderabad, Gurgaon, and New York later this year, with a more extensive global rollout of 100 rooms planned to be deployed by 2009.

About Tata Communications

Tata Communications is a leading global provider of communications to multi-national and Indian enterprises, service providers and Indian consumers. Services include transmission, IP, converged voice, mobility, managed network connectivity, hosting and storage, managed security, managed collaboration and business transformation for global enterprises and service providers, as well as Internet, retail broadband and content services for consumers. The Tata Global Network encompasses one of the most advanced and largest submarine cable networks, a Tier-1 IP network, with connectivity to more than 200 countries across 300 Pops, and more than 1 million square feet of data center and co-location facilities.

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