Sheraton hotel in Sydney gets Telepresence suite

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 24 February 2010 12:44

Business IT - Networking

Starwood hotel chain's Sheraton on the Park hotel in Sydney along with its W Chicago City Center hotel have become the first Starwood hotels to be equipped with Cisco TelePresence systems under a plan to link up the group's hotels worldwide.

In June 2009, Starwood announced a partnership with Tata Communications and plans to build Cisco TelePresence rooms in 10 properties worldwide. Two more Cisco TelePresence meeting suites will open in the first half of this year in the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers and Sheraton Centre Toronto.

A TelePresence installation is due to open in The Westin Los Angeles Airport later this year and are there are plans to add facilities in Dallas, San Francisco, Brussels, Paris, Hong Kong and Frankfurt.

According to Cisco, "As an industry first, reservations for these telepresence rooms can be made instantly using the Tata Communications online portal, with a convenient payment capability using all major credit cards."

Users of the rooms will be able to hold conferences with people in other similarly equipped Starwood hotels or a number of Tata public telepresence rooms around the world.

Tata Communications has several operational public rooms in India: in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi and Gurgaon; in London, Boston, Manila and Johannesburg

Peter Quinlan, director, managed telepresence services for Tata Communications, said "We intend to make telepresence available to as many users as possible with our global network of public telepresence rooms and our suite of managed telepresence network services for businesses. This opening is just the first step in that direction with many more in other key markets soon to follow this year."