Tata communications: telepresence - better than being there

When businesses calculate their carbon footprints, the key components are usually energy consumption and transportation.

For multi-national companies with offices around the world, the international travel component can be particularly high. Consider this – the average CO2 emissions for a person living in the UK is 8.8 tons per year.

A single return flight between London and New York itself emits 1.4 tons of CO2. 16% of an average annual total can be taken up in just a single relatively short intercontinental flight.

For companies which have major sites across multiple continents, the environmental impact of their executives' business travel is even more dramatic.

As such, for companies looking to reduce their carbon emissions, it becomes a priority to find alternatives to long-haul flights and collaboration technologies have certainly gone some ways to enabling more effective group work.

Audio conferencing, web conferencing, instant messaging all help people work better together from their respective locations.

High Definition Collaboration

The arrival of telepresence technology takes collaboration across dispersed geographies to a whole new level.

Telepresence is high-definition immersive conferencing with brilliant audio quality. "The people at the other end look life-sized, there's no delay or distortion in the sound of their voice and you really feel like you are speaking to them in person," says Peter Quinlan, Director of Managed Telepresence Services at Tata Communications.

Fulfilling the potential of video conferencing, participants in a telepresence session see and hear their counterparts like they were in the same room, making the experience very positive and productive.

Participants can focus fully on the discussion or work at hand rather than be distracted by any challenges with the technology – like delays, blurred visuals and dropped sound. They can also employ their whole body language to get their message across, and communication is so much more natural and as a result – effective.

Metcalfe's Law

Tata Communications is leading the field by offering a comprehensive managed Telepresence service and opening the first public Telepresence rooms to businesses across the world.

This means that Tata Communications can provide turnkey Telepresence facilities to enterprises at their headquarters and other major locations.

Then the public Telepresence rooms enable their smaller sites, partners, suppliers and customers to access this groundbreaking service – at an affordable, pay-per-use hourly rate.

The more people are connected to Telepresence, the more valuable the service is to the company.One Stop Shop Tata Communications' complete portfolio of Telepresence network and managed services offers companies a reliable, highly secure and easy-to-use facility.

Tata Communications' global network ensure robust and optimum quality connectivity. The costs of implementation the Telepresence service are lowered by providing managed infrastructure in the Tata Communications network cloud.

The Telepresence managed service includes a concierge service that takes care of reservations, scheduling, customer support, monitoring, management, reporting and billing capabilities, making it easy for customers to deploy and manage a highly effective collaboration tool.

First Public Telepresence Rooms in the World

The public room offering creates a larger network of interconnected rooms and expands the Telepresence market to small and mid-sized businesses.

Tata Communications has now opened six public rooms around the world – in India : Mumbai, Bangalore (two facilities) and Chennai; in Europe : London; and in the United States : Boston.

They are currently located at Taj Hotels properties or at Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) offices.

Tata Communications have 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. Seeing is Believing Telepresence has enabled companies to cut down up to 30% of their international travel because it is a truly viable alternative to face to face meetings.

People who have experienced Telepresence leave the sessions energized with many ideas of additional ways to utilize the cutting edge technology.

Aside from saving significant tons of CO2 emissions and costs from the reductions in international flights, there are the very considerable benefits of improving the quality of life of users by saving them the time and hassles of international travel.

To experience Telepresence directly, readers can request a free demo at any of the Tata Communications public Telepresence rooms.

For more details about these locations, a video tour and other useful information, please visit : www.tatacommunications.com/telepresence or email : telepresence@tatacommunications.com

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Source: Press release