Sabre Travel Network and Cisco are jointly developing a
vendor-agnostic distribution system for travel agencies, corporations and
meeting planners to book telepresence suites, the companies announced last
month.
The companies have yet to set a formal launch date for
availability of the system that will allow users to view telepresence room
availability, compare rates and book meetings, but development is underway for
what essentially is a global distribution system for "telepresence with a
little T," said Sabre Travel Network president Greg Webb. The plan is to
make content available through the system that goes well beyond Cisco's branded
TelePresence system, he said, enabling suppliers that have public rooms like
hotels, FedEx Kinko's and even competing telepresence tool providers, from Tata
to Hewlett-Packard, to distribute through the system. "Cisco realizes, as
we did, that for the distribution of telepresence rooms you really need all the
players involved," Webb said.
Still, at press time Sabre and Cisco had yet to announce
agreements with the major competitors to distribute offerings through the
system.
That would be the linchpin to the system's success, said S.
Ann Earon, president of remote conferencing management consulting firm
Telemanagement Resources International and chair of the Interactive Multimedia
Collaborative Communications Alliance.
"The issue is: Do the others want to play with them?"
she asked. "In other words, will the Polycoms, Telaruses and HPs of the
world step up to being part of this? I think this only works if everybody sings
'Kumbaya.' When HP and Polycom are on board, that would carry tremendous
weight."
The intent also is to allow corporations and other private
owners of telepresence suites "to wall off their private rooms" to
enable their own employees and meeting planners to reserve them through the
same system, Sabre's Webb said, akin to the GDS capability to load and
distribute both public and private airfares to corporate travelers.
"There is no platform out there for public companies to
make public consumption available in the telepresence space," Webb said. "There's
no distribution for that, and the key buyers of telepresence are the same
people who are buying business travel already."
On the ratio of publicly available rooms versus private
rooms, Earon said, "It's very small, public to private." Though there
are public rooms provided by such firms as Affinity VideoNet and Regus and by
some hotel chains, the vast majority of rooms are privately owned and operated,
she said, creating yet another content issue that would challenge the viability
of a telepresence GDS.
Furthermore, Earon noted that some companies might have
issues with making their system available for public consumption and allowing
outsiders to come into their office space.
"I think we'll have to wait and see the reaction of the
end users and whether they're interested in using their rooms for public
consumption," according to Earon. "I can tell you a lot of them will
not be. We tried this many years ago with videoconferencing, and a lot of large
companies view their rooms as private, and they didn't want public access to
them. They might have said, as some did, 'we'll give you access to one or two
rooms,' but they wouldn't give public access to all of their facilities."
Earon suggested a simpler solution to the problem of finding
and reserving remote conferencing space.
"What is truly needed, more so than a distribution
platform, is a directory," Earon said. "Many years ago, when
videoconferencing became prolific, AT&T put together a fairly extensive
videoconferencing room directory, which was almost like a phone book. It gave
you the locations of the room, the contact names and the phone numbers, so if
you had a videoconferencing room and wanted to use somebody else's, you knew
who had them. While I think this distribution platform has merit, I would love
to see it coupled with a directory."
Still, the functionality, as envisioned by Sabre and Cisco,
would go well beyond a mere listing of the who, what and where of telepresence
rooms.
For example, GetThere general manager Suzanne Neufang said
Sabre plans to make the remote conferencing distribution system available for
shopping and booking in various points of sale, including booking tools and
agent desktops, as well as those offered by competitors. Companies using the
system would be able to build and enforce policy through the point of sale,
similar to policy engines in corporate travel booking tools, Webb added.
Even so, getting to that point remains some time away,
though the co-developers have yet to commit to a go-live date.
Sabre said the effort is an outgrowth of its development of
an internal system at Cisco, a company that has aimed to cut its own business
travel through the use of remote conferencing technologies.
"They really did an excellent job of curtailing their
travel through these other options," Webb said. "We did some
development for them on the GetThere side around visual guilt, and we had
worked with their travel team to help them pull down their travel as much as
possible. We realized very quickly there is a need for this."
Vice president and general manager of Cisco's TelePresence
Exchange business unit Mark Weidick in a statement said, "Cisco believes
that by distributing telepresence unit availability using a common platform
with appropriate viewing restrictions and access controls, corporations will be
able to improve productivity and drive new levels of collaboration across their
organizations and with their partners, customers and suppliers."
This report originally
appeared in the Sept. 6, 2010, issue of Business Travel News.