The public room offering creates a network of interconnected rooms and expands the telepresence market to small and mid-sized businesses. The service offers reservations, scheduling, customer support, monitoring, management, reporting and billing capabilities.
According to Tata Communications, it is working with Cisco, Taj Hotels’s owner, the Indian Hotels Company, 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 2008, 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.
Cisco also introduced a public Cisco TelePresence suites facility in Santa Clara, California. It’s telepresence provides conferencing facilities to the participants to meet their colleagues, customers and business partners across a virtual table.
Tata Communications have plans to open additional rooms in Hyderabad, Gurgaon, and New York later in 2008, with a more extensive global rollout of 100 rooms planned to be deployed by 2009.
Vinod Kumar, COO of Tata Communications, said: 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.
