Putting telepresence on the desktop

Teleconferencing services are, of course, not new, but the cloud is extending its range and capabilities in the same way with many other areas of business – by making the capabilities and services more widely available to business users that otherwise could not afford the upfront investment.

This is particularly the case when it comes to utilising high quality immersive telepresence and videoconferencing services, which can offer a close, virtual reality version of actually being round the same table. This, however, normally requires the use of specialist, on-premise systems that represent a significant investment. Obtaining the same results via cloud-delivered services can represent a significant saving for many businesses.

With this in mind Dimension Data, which already offers  Managed Services for Visual Communications (MSVC) operations, has moved to acquire cloud video-managed services multinational, Teliris, which has pioneered cloud-based managed telepresence services that provides immersive telepresence and videoconferencing through its own proprietary platform, Lentaris.

Dimension Data claims to have the most comprehensive set of on-premise, managed, in the private cloud or as-a-service video services in the world.  Through its MSVC operations, the organisation manages over 20 000 calls per month for 430 clients across 5 600 Cisco and Polycom endpoints today.

, “The acquisition of Teliris is an investment in skills and expertise, and gives Dimension Data expanded scale to support the growth in our Managed Services for Visual Communications business,”Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data’s ITaaS Business Unit said.  “Teliris’ cloud capabilities complement Dimension Data’s existing portfolio of both cloud services and managed services offerings. This, combined with the excellent experience and skillset of the Teliris operational staff in the US and UK enables Dimension Data to accelerate the development of a true Video Conferencing-as-a-Service (VCaaS) offering to the market.”

From the Teliris perspective, the acquisition has allowed it to join forces with one of the market leaders in the video and managed services space. It will be able to piggy-back off the range of service offerings from Dimension Data, such as allowing customers to extend their use of Teliris services from the boardroom only an on to desktops. The goal is to provide a comprehensive set of managed services for the entire video and unified communications estate.

Teliris will retain its brand for the foreseeable future, and will continue to offer the services that it does today, and support its current managed services clients using its own proprietary technologies and cloud platform.