Mobily, Saudi Arabia's second telecommunications company, together with nine global service providers, announced Tuesday the launch of the Global Meeting Alliance, an open ecosystem of leading telecom providers that have aligned to interconnect their respective business video communities. Launch members include Sprint, Glowpoint and TELUS in North America, Safaricom in Africa, Telstra in Australia, Etisalat, Qtel, Tata Communications and Neotel in South Africa. The launch represents the largest functioning global collaboration between service providers in business video services. The Global Meeting Alliance network allows any service provider to connect to enterprises and institutions on all major continents, irrespective of service provider, following a similar business model to the airline alliance networks. Customers of the Global Meeting Alliance members now have access to an international Telepresence network of 3rd party video endpoints, as well as the largest global public Telepresence room network consisting of 40 public Telepresence suites in 20 countries. In addition, the community will engage in a collaborative approach to solve shared-industry challenges with the central objectives of making business video available globally, simple to connect and affordable for all. The Global Meeting Alliance will simplify the launch and operation of business video worldwide, making it more affordable and enabling service providers to optimize their regional networks to interconnect with a global network and conferencing infrastructure maintained by the Global Meeting Alliance operator. To participate in global meetings, the end user or their Global Meeting Alliance service provider leverages a centralized scheduling system to book business video conferences with any other certified organization. Meetings are either initiated directly by the Global Meeting Alliance conference production team or by the end user who dials a meet-me access number and enters the PIN provided by the scheduling system. All meetings are enabled by a carrier-grade global video platform with infrastructure in four geographically diverse locations. The Global Meeting Alliance service providers have integrated their services with the Global Meeting Alliance inter-company system which enables customers to book and launch meetings with end-users that are not directly served by the same service provider. The service supports video business sessions that can include SD, HD and Immersive devices from the Cisco, Tandberg and Polycom product lines. Dr. Marwan Al Ahmadi, CBO, Mobily, said "Saudi Arabia is home to many global companies that need to interact with different offices, partners and customers around the globe. Mobily's participation in the Global Meeting Alliance provides these organizations options to leverage business video to enhance this collaboration." A standard set of processes and guidelines are applicable for service delivery and operations for all Alliance members. In addition, common customer services tools will be used to schedule, conduct and provide support for video meetings. This will reduce the complexity of usage for the end user and ensure that a standardized approach and quality is adhered to by the Alliance.
