Sabre Travel Network and Cisco are jointly developing a vendor-agnostic
distribution system for agencies and corporations to book telepresence suites,
the companies announced Thursday.
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 president of Sabre Travel Network Greg Webb. He noted that
the content available through the system would go well beyond Cisco's branded
TelePresence system, 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.
The intent also is to allow corporations "to wall off
their private rooms" to enable their own employees to reserve them through
the same system, Webb said, akin to the GDS capability to load and distribute
both public and private airfares to corporations.
"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."
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,
including 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 noted.
The development effort is an outgrowth of Sabre's development
of an internal system at Cisco, a company that has aimed to cut its own
business travel significantly 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 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."