Telecommunication companies, Telstra and Tata Communications, have signed up to the Global Meeting Alliance, a network which will allow its customers to hold international video meetings, irrespective of participating service providers.
Other Alliance members include Safaricom in Africa, Etisalat, Qtel and Mobily in the Middle East, Neotel in South Africa and Sprint, Glowpoint and TELUS in North America.
Customers of these companies have access to an international telepresence network of third party video endpoints, as well as 40 public telepresence suites in 20 countries.
To participate in global meetings, the customer uses a centralised scheduling system to book business video conferences. The service support sessions use high definition (HD) video as well as Cisco, Tandberg and Polycom devices.
Telstra data IP network application and services executive director, Philip Jones, said in a statement that telepresence and business video services are becoming increasingly popular with Australian organisations as they offer productivity and cost benefits.
Telstra is also a member of the Open Visual Communication Consortium (OVCC), an organisation working to establish a multi-network, multi-vendor environment, delivering consistent video conferencing.
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