CISCO

 MOSCOW – May 11, 2012 – Cisco today announced that Russia's first public telepresence service has been launched by Cisco, Tata Communications and BizKomm, a Cisco Registered Partner in Russia. The public telepresence room located in Moscow's Monarch business center offers immersive virtual communications, fully imitating personal face-to-face meetings. Unlike traditional video conferencing solutions that employ standard-quality video and audio, Cisco TelePresence® technology fully immerses the participants in a virtual communications environment with full-size high-definition images. The environment looks astonishingly realistic as if the participants are sitting together in one room.

Tata Communications will offer channel provisioning and management of the Russian public telepresence room that will be linked with all public and private telepresence rooms of the Tata Communications Global Meeting Exchange – one of the world's largest telepresence networks available today.  Access will also be provided to the world's largest Tata Communications Public Room Telepresence Network, which includes 40 rooms in five continents. This network coverage makes telepresence a viable tool of international collaboration.

The services of Russia's first public telepresence room will be especially attractive and valuable to international companies, local companies with foreign partners and suppliers, international recruiting agencies, and international business schools and universities with distance-learning courses, as well as to research and development teams distributed among different countries.

In 2012 the partners plan to open public telepresence rooms in Russia in the cities of St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, Sochi and Khabarovsk.

Supporting Quotes:

Alexander Strakhov, regional sales director, Tata Communications, Russia, CIS, and Baltics:

"Telepresence is a game-changing technology for business. Russia has joined our global network, which is an important step forward in our video business strategy aimed at making the technology available to as many organizations as possible through our global telepresence network."

Roman Mornev, CIO, BizKomm:

"Public telepresence makes it possible for businesses to meet remotely at the top management level without capital expenses related to procurement, installation, management and software upgrades.  By opening telepresence rooms in Russia, we try to make advanced video technologies more available in order to enhance the quality of corporate communications."

Irina Stepanova, regional director, Collaboration Technologies, Cisco, Russia, and CIS:

"Cisco TelePresence makes it possible to call stakeholders from all regions of the world, put them in one virtual room, and give them the feeling of personal presence to accelerate data exchange and raise efficiency of communications.  Rented public telepresence rooms enable productive meetings with customers, partners and suppliers worldwide to cut travelling expenses and optimize office hours of the employees."