Today we are kicking off our Telepresence Options Interviews and Company Profiles with an interview with Marc Trachtenberg, Co-founder, CEO, and CTO of telepresence managed service provider Teliris.  Marc discusses Teliris, the various Teliris telepresence offerings, and InfiNET the company's telepresence Community of Interest Network (CoIN) that connects Teliris clients to the other firms on the InfiNET network.  Check back in the days and weeks to come to find Company Profiles of the leading firms in telepresence and inter-networking telepresence and interviews with the leading executives in the field.

While recently in New York City, I sat down with Marc Trachtenberg, co-founder, CEO and CTO of Teliris and one of the telepresence industry's early pioneers.  Teliris remains one of only a handful of telepresence-specific service providers in the market delivering telepresence solutions (environments, modular offerings, and executive systems) along with a global network, InfiNET, and a full suite of telepresence managed services. While visiting with Marc we had a chance to experience the VirtuaLive room in a telepresence session connecting New York and London.

Here are some of the highlights of the discussion with Marc:

Teliris focuses on a managed service model providing the right telepresence environment/solution married with the network and support services required to deliver a highly reliable meeting experience.

Customers typically choose a mix of capabilities to address their collaboration needs. The first step is to choose the room. The Teliris VirtuaLive solution comes in 3 flavors:

• Teliris Unified - Teliris converts an empty room into an immersive telepresence environment including the necessary tables, chairs and the company's unique screen and camera technology to produce a consistent and natural experience.

• Teliris Modular - A modular telepresence offering that fits into a standard conference room or other space
  and converts it into a telepresence room.

• Teliris Executive - an executive telepresence system that fits easily into an executive's office or small conference room that connects them to other Teliris group or executive systems.

Teliris clients then choose the options for presentation, data collaboration or white boarding and whether or not they require gateway capabilities to traditional video conferencing or other supported telepresence solutions.

Finally, clients can bundle Teliris solutions with the company's managed services and InfiNET network that gives you end-to-end reliable meeting experience.

Inter-Networking.

Marc discusses the Teliris' InfiNET network, a telepresence Community of Interest Network (CoIN) that allows secure inter-company calls between disparate companies on the InfiNet network.  Marc claims the company has more telepresence calls going on between customers on the InfiNET network, than any other telepresence provider in the world. Not only can you communicate with the other Teliris' customers on the network but with their recently announced Gateway product, they can go off-net to communicate with traditional video conferencing endpoints or even other telepresence solutions.

Marc believes inter-company business is an important point in the evolution of the market - telepresence becomes really leverage-able when you are able to communicate within your own company and with other organizations in a community of interested participants. Mark makes the point that you have to assure that the experience is going to be as good as if you were talking to your own system and that's the real challenge for the industry.

Future Plans.

Marc plans to bring the Teliris view of telepresence, which he believes is a fundamentally different view than many of their competitors to more customers in more markets. Teliris plans to connect more demo centers around the US, in Europe, a VNOC in Asia, and a new series of announcements starting in the 1^st quarter of 2008 to raise the bar in the face-to-face experience that we call telepresence.

Other:

Telepresence Options Interviews and Company Profiles Launched! - Today our interview with Teliris CEO Marc Trachtenberg is the first in a series of Company Profiles of the leading firms in telepresence and inter-networking telepresence and interviews with the leading executives in the space.  Sign up for RSS or e-mail delivery of to learn more about the technology, companies, and executives that are revolutionizing global communications.