Company: Virtela Communications, Greenwood Village, CO
Entry Submitted By: Greenough Communications
Company Description: Virtela delivers award-winning network and security solutions to multinational companies spanning 190+ countries. Virtela's Global Service FabricSM delivers critical applications via the company's acclaimed service methodology, including MPLS- and IP-based VPNs, security services, remote monitoring and management of WAN/LAN infrastructure, and converged services.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Telecommunications

Nomination Title: Virtela's Secure Video Extranet Service

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 500 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and sales to date. You may include hyperlinks to product photos and data sheets. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

As budgets tighten, technology prices fall, and environmental awareness rises,
more and more companies are looking to videoconferencing as a solution.  With
the recession taking its toll, budgets for business travel were among the first
casualties.  The cost-efficiency, productivity, and environmental benefits of
telepresence are well-known.  For example, Forrester estimates that globally
dispersed organizations experience 47% or more return on investment (ROI) over
five years.  However, videoconferencing deployments often fail to reach their
full potential because of the challenges associated with connecting to partners,
customers, and vendors whose endpoints reside on different carrier networks.
Companies may even face challenges connecting all of their own offices.  In June
2008, Virtela overcame these hurdles with the industry’s first Secure Video
Extranet (SVE), a service that enables safe and high-quality video connections
between parties on different networks.

Before Virtela’s innovation, visual communication between sites on different
networks was usually limited to connections over the Internet with public IP
addressing to maintain the security integrity of each network.  This type of
connection jeopardizes a company’s return on all of the time and dollars
invested in video equipment, HDTVs, room modifications, and end user training.
Internet peering adds jitter, latency and packet loss, all of which can severely
degrade video quality due to the vast amounts of information and have limited
error correction ability.  The result is jerky or frozen video and dropped
audio.  With video, dropped packets cannot be re-sent, so even a slight
performance disruption is highly noticeable and can quickly render the
communication intolerable for users.

Virtela’s SVE overcomes both these performance issues and the security concerns
of companies connecting to external parties.  Virtela acts a neutral third party
and leverages its proprietary Regional Policy Centers to create private and
secure interconnection points between disparate carrier networks, bypassing
public connections and their inherent performance degradations.  The links
between each enterprise site and Virtela’s point of presence can be dedicated
links or can just be connections that Virtela makes to the existing enterprise
MPLS VPN in the location’s WAN provider.  Traffic then flows between Virtela
locations on the best possible path and is handed off to the provider or link
supporting the destination site.

Virtela’s SVE lies on top of the foundation of its underlying network’s
intelligence and sophistication inherent in the Global Service Fabric (GSF).
Virtela delivers services in more than 190 countries and partners with hundreds
of technology and network providers, combining best-of-breed technology with
best-in-class networks in each region of the world. Because Virtela partners
with multiple networks in each region of the world and is both carrier- and
vendor- neutral, it can ensure traffic is optimally routed between two parties
and dynamically re-routed in real-time to avoid poor-performing and congested
networks.

Unlike other providers’ solutions, Virtela’s network works with any customer’s
preferred access options.  This means customers and their partners do not have
to pay to switch access providers when deploying the video service; they get
more service for less up-front investment. 

List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, product reviews, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

Press release: Virtela Launches Secure Video Extranet Service -
http://virtela.com/press_release_details.aspx?ID=100

Managed extranet description - http://www.virtela.com/managed_secure_extranet.asp

Aricle in xchange magazine by Virtela’s Kathy Lynch: “Set the Stage for Video
Conferencing ROI”
-http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/528/set-the-stage-for-video-conferencing-roi.html

Spotlight on SVE, “Virtela connects telepresence” -
http://www.nojitter.com/blog/archives/2008/08/virtella_connec.html;jsessionid=TXDFPP5LEI1QMQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN

Article on SVE, “Video over IP options” -
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/converg/2008/072108converge1.html

Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Jian Li, CTO has played an instrumental role at Virtela, from introducing a
disruptive new business model eight years ago to creating the advanced
architectural design of Virtela’s IP & MPLS network infrastructure. He continues
to identify new technologies for Virtela’s award-winning managed service portfolio.
Prior to Virtela, Jian drove state-of-the-art solutions for network evolution
and convergence as Senior Director of Emerging Technologies at Qwest.  He was
integral to bringing a number of key start-ups into the Qwest IP network and
data centers, including Redback Networks (acquired by Ericsson), Juniper
Networks and Extreme Networks.