Sabre and Cisco team to distribute telepresence services

Virtual tours of hotel rooms have been around for awhile, but Sabre and Cisco are taking tweaking the concept and applying it to the viewing and distribution of telepresence virtual-meetings spaces.

Sabre Travel Network and Cisco plan to develop jointly what Sabre terms the travel industry’s “first platform to distribute collaboration services.”

Under the partnership, corporations looking to reserve telepresence spaces and facilities would be able to view room availability, book the meetings and view rates and restrictions.

And, suppliers — in this case both companies which provide telepresence facilities publicly and corporations with private rooms for telepresence activities — would be able to use the Sabre-Cisco platform to display open or restricted access to their facilities.

For example, corporations which don’t choose to make their telepresence offerings widely available, would be able to restrict viewership to business partners of their choosing and employees, Sabre says.

Greg Webb, the president of Sabre Travel Network, says the electronic distribution platform will be open to all points of sale, including Sabre’s GetThere, of course, as well as other corporate booking tools.

GetThere already has a relationship with telepresence vendor Tata Communications and other suppliers would be able to connect to the new telepresence platform via APIs, officials said.

The telepresence distribution platform, which is under development and would be rolled out sometime in 2011, features a business rules engine, corporate profiles, rates and availability.

The telepresence would be integrated into GetThere, the Sabre desktop, and points of sale outside the Sabre Travel Network.

Speaking to journalists in a presentation related to the announcement, Webb said the economic model for telepresence distribution would vary from the GDS model and likely would be a “mixed model,” including divergent pricing based on whether suppliers are offering telepresence facilities for public or internal corporate use.

Webb said the partnership talks with Cisco — and agreements are still being finalized — grew out of Sabre’s work with Cisco on helping the company to trim its travel spend.

And, Chris Kroeger, Sabre Travel Network’s vice president of marketing, referred to estimates about the potential size of the telepresence market and the push by many corporations to cut spend through telepresence activities.

Kroeger cited a BersteinResearch report which estimated in the coming years in the U.S. there may be 6-8 million conference rooms, with about 30% of them serving as teleconference spaces.

“Travel remains the primary means for collaboration,” Kroeger said, but there is a growing demand for telepresence distribution and services.