Providea Announces Public Telepresence Offering to Customers

It’s been quite a busy quarter for us at Providea.  We constantly strive to bring our customers the latest innovation in visual collaboration technologies and to exceed expectations around our service offerings. With that, we are excited to announce that we are now offering our customers Public TelePresence room rentals. 

In July of this year, Providea and Regus, the world’s largest provider of workplace solutions, announced a multi-year agreement whereby Providea will provide ClearVideo Conferencing Services, Managed Video Services, 24/7 Help Desk Support and connection to Providea’s Universal Connectivity platform to support Regus’ HD video conferencing systems at over 300 locations across the US and Canada.

For Providea customers, video conferencing has become a natural part of everyday communication for individuals and teams across their organization.  We share a common belief that the more you become accustomed to video, the harder it is to conduct meetings any other way. With access to Public TelePresence rooms through Providea, customers can leverage their video investment and visually collaborate with customers, suppliers or even interview their next job candidate over video.

Learn more about Providea’s Public TelePresence offering.

Providea Conferencing Announces Partnership with Regus To Deliver Professional and Managed Services throughout North America

Driving Communications Solutions That Enable Anyone, Anywhere to Communicate in High Definition

Camarillo, CA – July 25, 2011 – Providea Conferencing, LLC, a leading provider of telepresence and HD video conferencing solutions and Regus, the world’s largest provider of workplace solutions, announced today that they signed a multi-year agreement to bring a series of business class video services to Regus’ customer base.

Providea will enhance Regus’ videoconferencing offering by providing ClearVideo Conferencing Services, Managed Video Services, 24/7 Help Desk Support and connection to Providea’s Universal Connectivity platform. These services, in combination with Regus’ migration to IP and upgrade to HD video conferencing systems, will allow Regus to offer unparalleled videoconferencing services to their clients at over 500 locations in the Americas.

“A key component to our solution is our Universal Connectivity platform that will allow customers to have QOS connectivity into the Regus portfolio of HD video rooms, and an unprecedented experience for video room rentals,” said John Price, Executive Vice President, Professional and Managed Services of Providea. Universal Connectivity eliminates hardware and network dependencies by providing a network agnostic, cloud based interconnect for private enterprise networks, the public internet, other exchange networks, and ISDN/PSTN.

“Tens of thousands of customers across the United States already use Regus videoconferencing suites to reduce their travel expenses and increase their productivity by spending less time on the road. This partnership with Providea will not only expand our video service capabilities across the Americas, it will help us to provide a flawless execution for every customer experience, and an even more cost effective solution for business,” stated Andre Sharpe, Global Director of Product & Business Development, Regus.

“This announcement highlights Regus’ commitment to being the premier leader in the public video room arena. By combining our award winning Professional Services with Regus’ global facilities, video communications will be that much more accessible and provide an ease of use for end users,” said Todd Luttinger, President & CEO of Providea.

About Providea Conferencing LLC
Headquartered in Camarillo, CA with offices nationwide and internationally in the United Kingdom, Providea Conferencing offers a full suite of telepresence and HD video conferencing solutions, along with comprehensive system and network design consultation and world-class support. Founded in 1999, the Providea team boasts years of experience in videoconferencing, professional services, multi-media design/build, multi-point bridging, network configuration and the best practices for successful deployment and utilization of these technologies. Leading organizations within the financial, legal, technology, healthcare, entertainment, and education and government sectors rely on Providea Conferencing.

Providea Conferencing, LLC, the Providea logo and other Providea marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Providea Conferencing, LLC. For more information on Providea visit www.provideallc.com

About Regus
Regus is the world’s largest provider of workplace solutions, with products and services ranging from fully equipped offices to professional meeting rooms, business lounges and the world’s largest network of video communication studios. Regus enables people to work their way, whether it’s from home, on the road or from an office. Customers such as Google, GlaxoSmithKline, and Nokia join hundreds of thousands of growing small and medium businesses that benefit from outsourcing their office and workplace needs to Regus, allowing them to focus on their core activities.

More than 800,000 customers a day benefit from Regus facilities spread across a global footprint of 1,100 locations in 500 cities and 88 countries, which allow individuals and companies to work wherever, however and whenever they want to. Regus was founded in Brussels, Belgium in 1989, is headquartered in Luxembourg and listed on the London Stock Exchange. For more information please visit: www.regus.com

John Price presenting at Wainhouse Summit 2011

John Price, EVP Managed & Professional Services will be presenting at Wainhouse Summit in Philadelphia 2011 today at noon. “If Managed Services is the answer what exactly is the question?”.

Providea Conferencing Announces CTC (ClearTrac Control)

CAMARILLO, Calif., July 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Providea Conferencing, LLC, a leading provider of telepresence and HD video conferencing solutions announces the launch of ClearTrac Control (CTC), a new critical component to our Managed Video Services platform.

Many companies face challenges when it comes to managing their telepresence and video conferencing solution; most importantly is the ability to resolve issues before end users are impacted. System outages and network issues can create service interruptions that result in lost revenues and lost opportunities. CTC is an enterprise grade network and systems management platform allowing our customers the ability to monitor real-time their video conferencing services and network performance through a secure, customizable, web-based portal.

CTC provides a 360 degree view of all operational elements, including: user dashboards, live monitoring of video systems and networks, asset management, fault management, issue resolution, knowledge-base, configuration management, change control, and reporting.

CTC also provides immediate, 24/7 access to; system and application availability, service request submittals, problem resolution status, customer usage statements and custom reporting. CTC can monitor any video system regardless of the manufacturer and can be expanded to manage a customer’s entire IT infrastructure including routers, switches, servers and security appliances.

Our customers will maximize their return on investment by increased system uptime and availability. CTC is backed by Providea’s Real-Time Support, offering live, one-on-one support to resolve any service or network issue and ensure the success of your video conferencing solution.

“ClearTrac Control is a services delivery platform that will enable our team to resolve customer issues more quickly because we have combined CRM features such as asset management, issue resolution, and business processes with live monitoring of network devices, fault management and system performance. CTC is a completely agnostic platform that allows us to quickly navigate through complex operating environments including video, voice, networks, servers, and desktops. The improved visibility, functionality, and efficiency of CTC allows us to deliver support at conversation speed,” said John Price, EVP of Professional and Managed Services for Providea.

Business to Business Videoconferencing: Achieving Secure Universal Connectivity in the Digital Age

John Price, Executive Vice President of Professional and Managed Services has worked in conjunction with Wainhouse Research to share his solution to the true challenges of B2B communication. The solutions to bridge the gap in communication between companies is often called B2B & Universal Connectivity we at Providea refer to our solution in the terms “any to any” because with our solution that John has shared in Wainhouse’ White Paper your company is able to communicate with any system on any network through a vendor agnostic platform. There are a few key aspects that affect any successful communication that are outlined below, the full solution is mapped out in the whitepaper on our website http://bit.ly/hkSlaF

IP Networking Challenges for B2B Video

For IP-based videoconferencing, the key B2B challenges include the need to:

1. Traverse corporate firewalls without compromising security – video calling across the firewall is problematic because of the way in which data connections are opened and closed. Firewalls are asymmetric; they have a trusted and an untrusted side. Videoconferencing is symmetric; it requires bidirectional video and audio stream connections that must cross the firewall in order for the video call to be successful. Many firewall suppliers have upgraded their devices to account for voice and videoconferencing protocols, but not all customer firewalls in the field have been upgraded. In addition, NAT / firewall traversal solutions are available from a range of others including many videoconferencing vendors.
2. Provide adequate end-to-end IP bandwidth and throughput – unlike non-real time data traffic (e.g. web browsing, email), the user experience during a videoconference is severely impacted by bandwidth capacity and performance issues (e.g. packet loss, delay, jitter). In general, there are three ways to overcome this problem:
   o Overprovision the networks to avoid contention and packet loss
   o Implement QoS / prioritization technologies to maximize the throughput for videoconferencing traffic
   o Utilize videoconferencing solutions / protocols that are less sensitive to network issues (e.g. SVC) or provide some form of error correction / concealment (e.g. FEC). This method is less attractive to enterprises with an existing deployment of standards-based video systems as it may require the purchase and deployment of all new videoconferencing endpoints and infrastructure.
   This situation is compounded by the inability to peer private MPLS networks between carriers without the loss of QoS.

Deploy compatible addressing schemes – in order to make a connection between two devices (telephones, video systems, etc.), the addresses of these devices must be unique. If the connections are internal only (e.g. phone calls from internal extension to internal extension, or data connections from one internal device to another), the addresses need to be unique within the internal environment only. However, in order to support connections between internal and external devices, the addresses between all involved environments must be unique. Unfortunately, no truly global addressing scheme for IP videoconferencing exists today. Instead, addressing schemes are typically managed at the enterprise level.

Read the full paper to learn about the solutions Providea has pioneered on our website http://bit.ly/hkSlaF