Late last month, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and Tata Communications announced plans to offer telepresence facilities while Marriott International and AT&T announced a similar partnership plan. Both partnerships plan to use Cisco as the telepresence infrastructure supplier.

The Starwood Hotels and Tata Communications partnership agreement is part of a plan to roll out public telepresence rooms worldwide. Tata Communications will provide the network of public Cisco TelePresence rooms, with 10 facilities planned for opening by year-end.

The first suites are planned for Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, Sheraton on the Park in Sydney, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, The Westin Los Angeles Airport and W Chicago-City Center. Starwood also expects to expand the offer to hotels in Brussels, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. The Starwood and Tata partnership will provide public telepresence rooms that will be available on a per use basis at "an affordable per hour rental rate" according to the companies.

Tata already has six public rooms operational in India, one room in Boston, another in London, and a public room planned in Manila.

Marriott International also announcing it will offer guests AT&T's fully managed AT&T Telepresence Solution in 25 cities. Marriott initial plans call for Telepresence meeting suites New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Hong Kong, Shanghai, Frankfurt and London, with the first facilities expected to go live by the end of October.

The Marriott suites will be able to connect to other private Cisco TelePresence locations that are part of AT&T's managed telepresence solution offering intercompany connections.  

Arne Sorenson, president and COO of Marriott International said in a statement: "As the 24/7 world economy becomes more interconnected, the need to hold small global meetings that cross continents and oceans will only grow. We believe telepresence will create more business meetings because people can travel shorter distances and easily connect with colleagues and clients around the world."

Our observations: No word from Tata or AT&T about multi-carrier connectivity or when these networks will be interoperable with other vendors' systems, although Cisco and AT&T both have 2009 plans for multi-vendor systems interworking. Also, no word from the hotels in their prepared remarks on how many "frequent guest" points might be awarded with each session.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.