Tata Communications: TelePresence Meets Cloud Services
Greg Brophy is riding three technology waves all at once, and he’s inviting channel partners to ride along, too. As director of product management at Tata Communications, Brophy is helping to converge the worlds of TelePresence, managed services and cloud services.
In the MSPmentor FastChat Video below, Brophy describes how customers can leverage Tata TelePresence services within corporate offices and at 32 public rooms (such as hotel conference centers) across the globe.
Behind the Curtains
The Tata solution has Cisco TelePresence technology at its core, and it’s interoperable with multiple networks and exchanges worldwide. On the one hand, the TelePresence end-points reside within executive boardrooms and at conference centers. But on the other hand, Tata runs the back-end infrastructure in the cloud, and the entire solution is maintained as a managed service. The TelePresence services generate recurring monthly revenues for Tata.
No doubt, Tata is heading into a growing market. Indeed, the global market for managed telepresence and video conferencing services will grow from $512.5 million in 2010 to $1.2 billion in 2016, according to ABI Research. “If we look at our TelePresence deployments we continue to see our customers looking to have the infrastructure in the cloud, and not have to manage it,” said Brophy. “They want to have the ability to deploy TelePresence endpoints around the world, connect to our network and our common exchange facilities globally.” Plus, Tata has relationships with multiple carrier exchanges to ensure interoperability worldwide.
In one recent customer win, Hannover Re, a German reinsurance company with 18 locations in 16 countries, embraced Tata’s cloud-based TelePresence services. By plugging into Tata’s cloud, the company can host TelePresence sessions with partners worldwide that visit Tata’s public TelePresence rooms, noted Brophy.
Partner Opportunities
Still, this is more than a Tata-Cisco technology partnership. Take a closer look and you’ll discover Tata is a Master MSP of sorts — offering managed TelePresence services to partners as well as peer VARs and MSPs. “We’re working with carriers as partners,” notes Brophy. “And we certainly welcome partners to come in and connect to the network. They could even be reselling someone’s network and plugging into our global network.”
No doubt more Cisco partners will follow Tata’s lead into the cloud. At Cisco Partner Summit in early March, Cisco is expected to unveil a cloud computing partner program for VARs, MSPs and service providers.
