Through this new partnership, Iformata will leverage Teliris’ unparalleled interoperability capabilities as well as their entire telepresence product and service portfolio to broaden the solutions provided to Iformata clients.  Correspondingly, Teliris will enhance their solutions with the addition of Iformata’s Telepresence ExchangeSM to provide access to the entire portfolio of Iformata’s managed services. The two companies will also inter-link networks to provide business-to-business interoperability between each company’s growing customer bases.

“We are truly excited to be working with Teliris. Their vision and experience in the telepresence market and commitment to interoperability continues to gain industry recognition, and this relationship adds the next layer,” stated Brian Kinne Executive Vice President of Iformata. 

”This partnership will enable both companies to increase the value we individually provide to our clients today, and progresses the goal of making telepresence a ubiquitous collaboration vehicle for the entire enterprise market,” said Jim Kaufold, Teliris SVP Global Sales Strategy & Operations.

This strategic relationship joins together the two original telepresence industry pioneers.  Both companies, with 10+ years of telepresence experience, recognize that true interoperability cannot be accomplished solely by establishing secure access between separate network infrastructures.  In addition to network transport, three critical areas must be addressed. Interoperability requires transcoding to allow seamless integration of multiple video/audio coding standards. Secondly, improved meeting governance to address the challenges of booking and managing resources across organizational and geographic boundaries is critical.  Importantly, the telepresence meeting experience must be extended across vendors.  Both Iformata and Teliris have developed proven solutions that solve each of the aforementioned challenges and, through this partnership, will reinforce their value to the market.

Looking to the future, Iformata will continue to expand the definition and evolution of Telepresence ExchangeSM.  This partnership comes at a time when providing interoperability between multiple telepresence brands will immensely change the landscape of the telepresence industry.  Kinne adds, “This partnership is a culmination of our respective visions which continues defining true telepresence, including our Telepresence ExchangeSM.”

Several customers of both companies have deployed these capabilities and are experiencing the benefits of both Telepresence ExchangeSM and the Teliris Telepresence Gateway™  to achieve interoperability amongst multiple telepresence and video platforms.  “By combining the quality of Teliris with the reliability of Iformata our customers continue being the industry’s most satisfied users,” concluded Kinne.

As the longtime telepresence leader in both innovation and deployments, Teliris is the only option allowing the telepresence experience to be delivered over general purpose networks. Teliris has the broadest suite of telepresence products ranging from sub-$8,000 desktop solutions to boardroom systems. All Teliris solutions offer comprehensive interoperability options that allow for connection to any system, anywhere and an end-to-end managed service with a 99+ percent reliability guarantee.

About Iformata Communications

Iformata Communications, a privately held company, is the telepresence managed services and video network operations provider of choice for global enterprise firms, equipment manufacturers, and top-tier carriers and networks.  Through international peering relationships with major providers, and by integrating points-of-presence (POPs) in 37 countries throughout North America, the UK, Europe, and Asia, Iformata’s Telepresence Exchange is the leading video communications network connecting global Fortune 500 firms within a highly managed architecture.  Its technicians provide seamless and interoperable performance across disparate equipment, carriers, networks, and geographic locations.  The longest-serving provider of managed services and video network operations in the business, the founders of Iformata created the first immersive telepresence environments.

For more information, please visit www.iformata.com or call +1.937.832.6900.

About Teliris Telepresence:
Teliris develops and implements the world’s most widely deployed fully managed telepresence collaboration solutions, realistically replicating the human dynamics of an in-person meeting experience. Through its 6G platform and unique intellectual property, Teliris has radically simplified the acquisition, deployment and operating costs of telepresence, breaking new ground in adoption and reach of the technology. Teliris has deployments in over 50 countries with the largest installed base of Global 2000 companies, including Unilever, British American Tobacco, Lazard, Pearson plc, GlaxoSmithKline, and Royal Bank of Scotland, Xchanging and Merck, among others. Headquartered in New York and London, the company is the leading innovator in agile telepresence with end-to-end integration, market-leading 99%+ availability guarantee and interoperability with Cisco TelePresence, Tandberg Total Telepresence and Polycom RealPresence. For further information, visit www.teliris.com or email info@teliris.com.

VNOC Symphony provides users the option of scheduling meetings using multiple interfaces, such as Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, an intuitive web interface, an animated Microsoft Silverlight interface, among others.  Within several weeks, interface offerings for Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft OCS, and the Blackberry will also be available.

“VNOC Symphony redefines VNOC services from the ground up, creating a framework of interacting web-services within a service-oriented architecture,” said Scott Allen, CEO of Iformata Communications.  “This enables users many ways to view the same information, launch impromptu meetings, or schedule large conferences.”

At the heart of the platform is a runbook engine called VNOC Conductor which polices meeting setup, maintenance, and teardown in an enterprise environment according to an organization’s process rules.  Numerous parameters are configurable to ensure departmental or global directives are followed, including setup times, startup messaging, teardown messaging, in-progress meeting modification messaging, custom messaging, remedial functions, escalation processes, email and SMS notifications, charge-backs, conflict management, and many others processes that regulate a complex enterprise deployment.

Business process and implementation logic compiles into runbook processes during Iformata’s customer on-boarding phase. Iformata works with stakeholders within the organization to integrate current business practices with Iformata’s VNOC processes that are specific to the organization.  VNOC Symphony stores these processes to follow conference reservation, conference management, fault management and impromptu meeting practices that match the needs of the organization.

Numerous tools are available to users and administrators in the form of widgets, which are interacting web-services that communicate with VNOC Symphony’s framework.  Each widget provides a unique toolset, such as the reservation widget, the helpdesk widget, the reporting widget, and many others.  A Digital Airlines widget plots live conferences on a geo-spatial interactive map, showing all point-to-point and multipoint meetings graphically.  Users may pan and zoom the map from world view to street level, even showing multiple video systems interconnected on a campus network in close proximity.

“In the near future, we will be releasing the information necessary for corporations to write their own widgets and share this technology with other companies, rapidly growing the base of tools available for video management,” said Isaac Hogue, director of product development.  “This is a first in this industry that we hope will help both small and large businesses meet their unique and precise needs.”

“VNOC Symphony has been deployed to our users over the last few months,” said Loren Cunningham, founder of YWAM and president of University of the Nations.  “With video systems in thirty different countries, we finally have a powerful, full featured and integrated platform that meets the needs of different cultures in different time zones.”

Several reservation widgets already exist to provide numerous options to users.  A full featured reservation widget allows users to see photographs of each meeting room, add participants to each site, choose MCU framing, view time zones of each location, and modify in-progress meetings, among other features.  An express scheduler widget lets users quickly create a reservation with as few keystrokes as possible, listing the last ten meetings and ten sites as possible quick start selections.  A meet-now widget enables users to request immediate video services for sites selected, whether by web interface of mobile application.

“We found VNOC Symphony to be the most unique, powerful, and full featured tool in the industry for enterprise video management,” said Wayne McAllister, Tandberg’s senior vice president of global services. “Because it treats Tandberg’s TMS as an interface plug-in, customers can have the best of both worlds for infrastructure management and user facing tools.”

The helpdesk widget allows users to view real-time information of remedial action in-progress, or to report issues for assistance or corrective actions.  An automated ticket opening system based upon device threshold monitoring and interrogation will be available third quarter 2009.

VNOC Symphony is currently available in a hosted environment per user subscription and device registration basis.   View Iformata.com/symphony for product information, beta testing qualifications and program offers.

About Iformata Communications

Iformata Communications, a privately held company, is the telepresence managed services and video network operations provider of choice for global enterprise firms, equipment manufacturers, and top-tier carriers and networks.  Through international peering relationships with major providers, and by integrating points-of-presence (POPs) in 65 countries throughout North America, the UK, Europe, and Asia, Iformata’s Telepresence Exchange is the leading video communications network connecting global Fortune 500 firms within a highly managed architecture.  Its technicians provide seamless and interoperable performance across disparate equipment, carriers, networks, and geographic locations.  The longest-serving provider of managed services and video network operations in the business, the founders of Iformata created the first immersive telepresence environments.

For more information, please visit www.iformata.com or call +1.937.832.6910.

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