Tata Communications has joined hands with nine global service providers to launch the Global Meeting Alliance, an open ecosystem of telecom providers that have aligned to interconnect their respective business video communities.
The 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.
Commenting on the launch, Peter Quinlan, vice president, Integrated Business Video Services, Tata Communications, says, ?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.?
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? various intercarrier agreements, customers of the Global Meeting Alliance members now have access to an international telepresence network of third party video endpoints, as well as the largest global public telepresence room network consisting of 40 public telepresence suites in 20 countries.
