Tata Communications, together with nine global telecom companies, recently launched an open ecosystem of leading telecom providers who have aligned to interconnect their respective business video communities. Peter Quinlan, Director, Telepresence Services, Tata Communications discusses on the need to have a Global Meeting Alliance, and future plans. Excerpts:

-By Ashwani Mishra

Q] Tata Communications, together with nine global service providers, announced the launch of the Global Meeting Alliance. What was the primary need to have such an alliance in place?
Video is relatively a new technology when compared with voice, and there were a couple of key challenges associated with it. Firstly, not all carriers have a global network, and secondly not all carriers offered video as a service.

The aim of the alliance is to allow any service provider to provide video services to enterprises and institutions on all major continents, irrespective of service provider.

It is really about facilitating global connectivity for customers. How do we do it behind the scenes is a bit complicated but at the end of the day customers want to call globally and that is what we want to enable.

Though this alliance, customers can now access international telepresence network of third party video endpoints, as well as the global public Telepresence room network consisting of 40 public Telepresence suites in 20 countries.

Q] How does the alliance look to simplify operations and make it more affordable for business users?
There are a couple of ways to achieve these results. One is by signing up for services with any alliance partner. The business gets a single carrier relationship for all its global video calling needs. They do not need to have multiple carriers to support global connectivity.

Secondly, this enables to expand the range of potential calls that one might make. Businesses are not limited by their own individual carrier network. It extends the reach of his video capability, and this in turn helps businesses get the return on investment in video.

Q] How does the alliance intend to maintain the network and the infrastructure in the various regions?
The alliance partners will maintain their own networks, and also maintain some elements of the infrastructure in their region. This will allow them to facilitate the video experience in their region on their network.

We have got infrastructure, process and management that we provide that enables network to connect. The investment in infrastructure is a combination between regional partners as well as having an organization like Tata Communications in the middle. The management though is something that we collaborate on to make sure that there is a single management or control so that we can ensure consistent quality of experience. That is where we have worked to harmonize the standards where users see this as a single global service rather than a patch work of different networks.

Q] Moving ahead, can we see more service providers joining the alliance, as many of the big names have been missing from the list announced?
It is early days for the alliance. Many global carriers are not included in this announcement. Our goal is to try and bring everyone that we can into this alliance and enable a global collaboration for customers. Moving ahead we will see additional carriers join, and also additional types of end-points being added that we can support.

The announcement that we made was around tele presence and video conferencing. The service supports video business sessions that include SD, HD and Immersive devices from the Cisco, Tandberg and Polycom product lines. We can expect to see various types of devices and interconnection to other types of video collaboration services as well in the future.