By Charles F. Moreira
VADS’ Telepresence Exchange (VADS – TPX) gained worldwide reach over AT&T’s Business Exchange, following an interconnectivity agreement signed between the two companies in a telepresence session between VADS headquarters in Kuala Lumpur and AT&T in London on 11 December.
With this agreement, the 135 customer endpoints on VADS-TRX now have access to the over 3,000 endpoints on AT&T’s 130 Business Exchange, with 130 corporate customers and 50 additional customers across 80 countries and vice-versa.
Telepresence session between VADS and AT&T
En. Ahmad Azhar Yahya, VADS chief executive officer signed on an Apple iPad on behalf of VADS, while John Vladimir Slamecka, vice-president of AT&T Global Wholesale and Access Management signed on behalf of AT&T.
VADS and AT&T signing via telepresence
Built by VADS last year in collaboration with technology provider CISCO, VADS-TRX currently provides managed telepresence service to large enterprises and government, and this tie-up enables communication between them and customers on AT&T’s managed telepresence network.
The two parties’ networks enable telepresence sessions between customers using equipment ranging from an Apple iPad up to full-sized, multi-screen boardroom telepresence equipment such as from CISCO, Polycom, Aethra and other standards-compliant videoconferencing equipment.
VADS plans to deploy public rooms in suitable locations next year. Currently, VADS parent company, Telekom Malaysia has 14 public rooms in its buildings, while VADS in in discussions to deploy them in hotels and other public places.
 |
| VADS’ telepresence room |
Not to be confused with public toilets, public rooms are fully equipped facilities which can be rented for telepresence sessions by those who don’t have their own telepresence equipment, and this will help make telepresence more accessible to small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and small businesses, instead of large corporations.
The use of telepresence saves money and time for business executives to meet with their counterparts remotely in as realistic as possible a face-to-face setting and it’s also more environmentally friendly too. Last month, AT&T’s Business Exchange logged a total of 100,000 telepresence hours. Besides saving on the need for international and outstation travel, it also saves time and petrol of having to fight to attend meetings through the Klang Valley’s horrendously congested road traffic.
VADS-TPX core infrastructure resides in VADS’ data centre and runs on a highly secure and resilient network, while as its manager, VADS takes full responsibility for every aspect of it, which avoids messy situations of finger pointing of the blame for problems between suppliers of different parts of a telepresence system.
Telepresence is in line with the objectives of the government’s Communications, Content and Infrastructure – National Key Economic Area (CCI-NKEA) to make Malaysia more competitive worldwide.
“This is in line with Malaysia’s Digital Lifestyle initiative,” said Dr. Fadhullah Suhaimi Abdul Malek, director of the Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) National Key Results Area – Rural Basic Infrastructure (NKRA-RBI), NKEA-CCI and NKEA-Agriculture.
