British American Tobacco Selects Teliris Telepresence 6G Platform

ORLANDO, Florida - Total of 130 6G Telepresence Rooms Ordered in First 30 Days of General Availability

InfoComm 2009 — Teliris (www.teliris.com), the leading global provider of agile telepresence and collaboration, announced today that British American Tobacco will double their current Teliris Telepresence deployment as well as upgrade all existing systems to realize the benefits of the newly released agile 6G platform.

Leveraging Teliris’ groundbreaking 6G platform, British American Tobacco will double the number of Teliris Telepresence rooms originally anticipated this year at the same total cost of ownership enabling the company to surpass their carbon reduction goals. The new Teliris Telepresence locations will be in more than 10 countries including the United Kingdom, Chile, Pakistan, Vietnam, Venezuela, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Brazil, China, New Zealand & Spain.

According to David Sampson, British American Tobacco’s Group Mobility & Virtual Working Manager, “When British American Tobacco adopted telepresence, we set ourselves a number of ‘hard’ and ’soft’ targets for benefits. Our experience to date has been that all our targets have been exceeded. As well as the financial benefits, we also hope this will help lead to new ways of working and collaborating, ultimately giving our staff choices about how they want to work, freeing up their time and improving their work/life balance. Additionally, we hope telepresence will help us meet the stated sustainability goals, including a real reduction in our carbon footprint. We have set ourselves a target to reduce 11,000 tonnes of carbon over the next five years through telepresence and we have managed to a reduction of 50 percent of that in just one year.”

“We are thrilled, although not surprised, that British American Tobacco and other premier customers quickly realized the unrivaled value that Teliris’ 6G platform delivers,” said Tony Smith, Teliris European Managing Director. “We have secured over 130 orders in less than 30 days since our newest innovation became generally available and expect to continue at the same pace in the future.”

Over the last year, British American Tobacco has experienced annualized savings of 9 million pounds Sterling on travel expenses and recovered 96,000 working hours previously lost during travel. Additionally, the company saved over 6,000 tonnes of carbon by eliminating 5,592 short, medium and long haul flights. The company experienced a 250 percent increase in Teliris Telepresence meeting attendees with almost 13,000 participants in just one year. These benefits will continue to accrue at an accelerated rate due to the new system deployments.

Teliris’ 6G platform, which is based on a new agile client server-based software architecture, offers the broadest immersive telepresence and immersive collaboration portfolio available that allow for the most affordable experience with anyone in any location, at any time. As the longtime telepresence leader in both innovation and deployments, Teliris is the only option allowing the telepresence experience to be delivered over general purpose networks. Teliris has the broadest suite of telepresence products ranging from sub-US$8,000 desktop solutions to boardroom systems. All Teliris solutions offer comprehensive interoperability options that allow for connection to any system, anywhere and an end-to-end managed service with a 99+ percent reliability guarantee.

British American Tobacco:

British American Tobacco is the world’s second largest stockmarket-listed tobacco group by global market share, with brands sold in over 180 markets and employing 54,000 people. It is the only tobacco business selected for the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, for the 7th year running in 2008-09, scored on its economic, social and environmental performance.

About Teliris Telepresence:

Teliris develops and implements the world’s most widely deployed fully managed telepresence collaboration solutions, realistically replicating the human dynamics of an in-person meeting experience. Through its 6G platform and unique intellectual property, Teliris has radically simplified the acquisition, deployment and operating costs of telepresence, breaking new ground in adoption and reach of the technology. Teliris has deployments in over 50 countries with the largest installed base of Global 2000 companies, including Unilever, British American Tobacco, Lazard, Pearson plc, GlaxoSmithKline, and Royal Bank of Scotland, Xchanging and Merck, among others. Headquartered in New York and London, the company is the leading innovator in agile telepresence with end-to-end integration, market-leading 99%+ availability guarantee and interoperability with Cisco TelePresence, Tandberg Total Telepresence and Polycom RealPresence. For further information, visit www.teliris.com or email info@teliris.com.

Source: Teliris

Shanley Stern Gravel, +1-917-515-4548, or shanley.gravel at teliris.com, Hana Jeddy, +1-917-355-0026, or hana.jeddy at teliris.com, both of Teliris