TW2007 Day 2: Barry Nalls, Masergy CEO

2007.06.05 by John Serrao

Masergy CEO Barry Nalls was the next speaker at Telepresence World today and he had some salient advice. His first order of business was to establish telepresence as a savings model for business. He did this by explaining that telepresence enables communication thereby allowing more goods to come to market more quickly for companies that adopt it. This creates an indirect cost benefit in addition to the more logical reduction in travel expenses associated with a product such as telepresence.

He reiterated some of the sentiments Aaron McCormick of BT mentioned a day prior: the complexity and failure of legacy videoconferencing to deliver on its promises has significantly hampered the adoption of telepresence solutions. To that end, he underscored the importance of the human factors when addressing group communication.

After those interesting points, we got some of the Masergy sales pitch. Their biggest selling point is identical infrastructure services across the globe, regardless of location (they use an MPLS network if you are interested). They also use embedded services they pioneered to monitor all their networks worldwide and can upgrade bandwidth via the web. Most important for telepresence though, Masergy employs a 'daily throttle' they use to adjust traffic needs away from the systems when they aren't being used thus creating a multipurpose pipe the entire organization can use.