Orange Business and Customers Toast via Cisco TelePresence

wine tasting event showcases the power of Cisco TelePresence

To demonstrate the immersive effect of Cisco TelePresence™, Orange Business and Cisco held a virtual wine tasting event via Cisco TelePresence. Enterprise customers and prospects from six North American cities, as well as Santiago, Chile, attended the event, led by renowned wine expert Pascual Ibáñez. Attendees discussed and tasted selections from Viña Concha y Toro wine, the second largest winemaker in the world and an Orange Business customer with headquarters in Chile.

Cisco TelePresence harnesses the power and speed of today’s network to provide a fully immersed and life-sized virtual collaborative experience in high-definition. Attendees for the wine tasting engaged with one another about the color, taste and vintages in a virtual space that created the appearance of everyone occupying the same room even though they were all situated hundreds or even thousands of miles away from each other.

“Cisco TelePresence provides the perfect forum for preserving the personal and collaborative nature of face-to-face interactions regardless of location or distance,” said Diana Einterz, senior vice president, Americas, Orange Business. “As this event demonstrates, its applications stretch far beyond simple business meetings. We envision Cisco TelePresence being used to launch new products, coordinate logistics between partners and suppliers, ensure business continuity following a disaster, and serve as a guard against runaway travel expenses.”

Orange Business is at the forefront in pushing Cisco TelePresence as a standard next-generation service for enterprises. As a Global Master Cisco TelePresence ATP, Orange provides Cisco TelePresence integration services in 213 countries and territories. Orange has implemented network SLAs to preserve voice and video latency of less than 150 milliseconds for a high-quality experience in 47 countries, and has established ties with other global operators to ensure customers can use their Cisco TelePresence rooms with partners, suppliers and distributors. Orange is also currently pooling Cisco TelePresence infrastructure as a hosted and managed service which will lower costs though a pay-per-use model.

About Orange Business
Orange Business, the France Telecom-Orange branch dedicated to B2B services, is a leading global integrator of communications solutions for multinational corporations. With the world's largest, seamless network for voice and data, Orange Business reaches 220 countries and territories with local support in 166. Offering a comprehensive package of communication services covering cloud computing, enterprise mobility, M2M, security, unified communications, videoconferencing, and broadband, Orange Business delivers a best-in-class customer experience across a global landscape. Thousands of enterprise customers and 1.4 million mobile data users rely on an Orange Business international platform for communicating and conducting business. Orange Business is a four-time winner of Best Global Operator at the World Communication Awards. Learn more at www.orange-business.com

France Telecom-Orange is one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators with 169,000 employees worldwide, and sales of 45.5 billion euros in 2010. Orange is the Group's single brand for Internet, television and mobile services in the majority of countries where the company operates. France Telecom (NYSE:FTE) is listed on Euronext Paris (compartment A) and on the New York Stock Exchange.

Orange and any other Orange product or service names included in this material are trade marks of Orange Brand Services Limited, Orange France or France Telecom.