MTN Launches Cisco Telepresence in Lagos Abuja Port Harcourt – Resourcery
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010Cisco Telepresence finally live in 3 states in Nigeria, by MTN and technology partner, Resourcery Limited.
Karl Toriola must surely be proud of his time as CTO of MTN Nigeria. Nigeria’s number 1 Telecommunications company MTN, are the first to launch a 21st Century conferencing solution, Cisco’s flagship Telepresence (often marketed by Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers). Telepresence enables people in different locations to appear to be in the same board room. The users adjascent to the screen has no idea how far the others are as images are clear, sound is real and emotions and gestures can be seen like in real life meetings.
Telepresence is NOT exactly videoconferencing but employs the underlying technology, these two terms should therefore not be “inter-changed”. Telepresence, the most advanced visual conferencing solution to date, is very expensive (costs millions of dollars) to set up and requires huge pipes of bandwidth with low latency (preferably fibre). Very few companies can afford to implement Telepresence in different locations, it is therefore wise for Service Providers with Fibre (IP/MPLS rings) backbone to implement and lease to users (See AT & T Cisco Telepresence video below)
TelePresence Benefits
| » Reduce travel related costs |
| » Recover time spent travelling to and from meetings |
| » Eliminate security risk associated with travelling |
| » Increase productivity as time spent travelling can be channelled to more productive use. |
| » Make important decisions faster |
| » Hold important project meetings, negotiations, executive interviews etc can be held as often as necessary eliminating the constrains of travel |
MTN Nigeria Telepresence Sessions cost 60,000 naira per hour and seats a maximum of 6 individuals (2 minimum) per location (I guess that amounts to 10,000 naira per head). I mean you ship 6 men down to the hotel in Lagos and ask your business partners to arrive at the Abuja and PH venues 15 minutes before “kick-off” time, having paid 24 hours before, they set your meeting up and off you go. They give you 2 extra hours if your meeting lasts beyond 4 hours but I don’t see why anyone would sit at a virtually real boardroom for 6 hours!
Hey before you start cursing and fuming over reduction in per-diem, travel allowance, hotel back-runs etc, remember that Telepresence will keep you close to your family, reduce the risk of travelling, increase productivity, save you time and set up more impromptu meetings. You can even interview top prospects (including a new football coach) – HR Managers, take note. Kudos to MTN for taking the big risk as usual to be the first to deploy a solution that will make Nigerians proud.