TELUS launches Canada's first intercompany Cisco TelePresence service

TORONTO, CANADA: Cisco announced today that TELUS Corp. is the first Canadian telecommunications provider to offer intercompany Cisco TelePresence services across the country.

TELUS Intercompany Service with Cisco TelePresence combines existing enterprise networks with service provider connections to extend Cisco TelePresence meetings beyond an enterprise boundary, allowing companies of all sizes as well as individuals to use Cisco TelePresence to collaborate with colleagues, customers, suppliers, and partners. This means that any user at any organization can meet face to face via Cisco TelePresence with other users on other enterprise networks.

Cisco offers a complete Cisco TelePresence solution and fully validated reference architecture that facilitates calls between multiple enterprise networks to traverse the service provider network with no co-mingling of routes, addresses, or data.

Highlights/key facts:
* In January 2008, TELUS was the first Canadian telecommunications provider to achieve Cisco certifications to sell, deploy and support Cisco TelePresence.

* With this new service, TELUS joins the existing group of service providers spanning five continents to deliver intercompany Cisco TelePresence services, extending the availability of the technology to more than 150 countries and thousands of cities.

* The other carriers that have announced intercompany Cisco TelePresence services include AT&T, BT, Orange, NTT, Tata, Telefonica, TelMex and Telstra.

Cisco TelePresence has more than 500 customers and 3,000 systems deployed worldwide.

Here's a video from Ugo – the goofy, yet loveable TELUS spokesman for Unified Communications, on the benefits of video conferencing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG--JtEMejY