Teleplace to Provide Secure Virtual World Environment for Federal Government Agencies

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – May 12, 2010 – Teleplace, Inc., a leading provider of trusted collaboration solutions, today announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded a contract for the Teleplace secure virtual workspace platform for use in the vGov virtual world project. Teleplace teamed with Three Wire Systems, LLC, as the prime contractor, to win the contract award (AG-3142-C-10-0030), which will provide the USDA and its vGov agency partners: U.S. Air Force, Department of Homeland Security, National Defense University and U.S. Department of State with virtual worlds software and services. vGov is a federal government interagency virtual world project that is providing a secure virtual world environment for use in government-wide solutions.

“Teleplace secure virtual workspaces are already in use by U.S. government agencies, such as the Air Force, Army, Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs, for advanced training and collaboration,” said Teleplace CEO, Greg Nuyens. “We look forward to our involvement in vGov, which will extend the significant benefits of virtual world implementations to many government users.”

Teleplace is for government agencies and large corporations that want to deploy powerful distributed training, collaboration and project management virtual workspaces that are easy to deploy and use. Teleplace is the only enterprise-class collaboration solution that enables cross-platform application sharing both behind the firewall and in the cloud. The unique vPresence(tm) technology in Teleplace securely combines VoIP, chat, and video with a virtual application command center to accelerate data-centric collaboration.

“The USDA contract award is an important virtual worlds project win and we look forward to more opportunities to work together with Teleplace to provide government agencies with software and services that meet their strategic initiatives,” said Dan Frank, managing partner of Three Wire. “Having cost-effective, award-winning virtual worlds solutions, and a partner like Teleplace that is easy to work with, allows us to be responsive to the government's needs and has enabled us to win multiple contract awards.”

For the vGov project, Teleplace will leverage its extensive enterprise integration capabilities to integrate virtual worlds technologies with the USDA's IT infrastructure. The Teleplace platform already includes a broad range of enterprise-class capabilities such as support for Active Directory and LDAP, end-to-end encryption, pervasive authentication and access controls, and support for a wide range of enterprise applications and document formats.

For more information about Teleplace, visit www.teleplace.com.

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Teleplace Customers Stanford University, VetAdvisor, U.S. Air Force, Win Awards for Innovative Collaboration Technologies

U.S. Distance Learning Association, Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge, Air Force Education and Training Recognize Teleplace Virtual Workspaces

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – May 11, 2010 – Teleplace™ Inc., a leading provider of trusted collaboration solutions, today announced that three of its customers have recently received awards for their innovative use of the company's virtual workspaces for distance learning, virtual care coaching and online training programs.

• The U.S. Distance Learning Association announced last week that the Project Based Learning (PBL) Lab at Stanford University won a 21st Century Award for Best Practices in Distance Learning Distinction. The award recognized its Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC) Global Teamwork course, which uses Teleplace to enable global, cross-university teams to collaborate virtually.
• This March, the U.S. Army Simulation & Training Technology Center named VetAdvisor® Virtual Room, from Teleplace customer Three Wire Systems, a winner of its Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge for best collaboration in a virtual world by a government contractor.
• In January, the U.S. Air Force presented the 2009 Learning Innovation Award in Training to the 81st Training Wing, Keesler Air Force Base, for a 3D immersive environment built using Teleplace.

“We congratulate our customers on winning these three prestigious awards for the innovative virtual workspaces they've created with Teleplace,” said Greg Nuyens, CEO of Teleplace. “The use of Teleplace for online learning and training, remote collaboration and distributed project management has accelerated dramatically, and organizations are demonstrating huge mission effectiveness and productivity benefits from their deployments.”

When business users get together for a virtual meeting, they’re not interested in showing off the latest dance moves or hairstyles – they want to share PowerPoint presentations, work together on spreadsheets, and collaborate on documents.

At least, that’s the experience of virtual world vendor Teleplace, which counts over 100 corporations as customers – some of them big names, including Chevron, BP, Lockheed, Intel, and Fidelity. In addition, the company has a strong presence in the government and military sectors, counting the US Army, Navy, and Air Force as customers. Corporate deployments of the Teleplace platform grew 200 percent over the past year, the company reported last month. Teleplace Inc. used to be Qwaq Inc., and changed its name last September as part of a renewed focus on enterprise and government customers and the release of the 3.0 version of its platform.

(Image courtesy Teleplace.)

“Teleplace 3.0 is a great example of an immersive platform designed from the ground up for enterprise use,” said said Erica Driver, co-founder and principal, ThinkBalm, in a statement. ” With the scalability and ease-of-use enhancements in this latest release, Teleplace is well-positioned to secure even more enterprise wins.”

The company works with large organizations, helping them with training, project management, and operation centers, Teleplace CEO Greg Nuyens told Hypergrid Business.

Teleplace CEO Greg Nuyens

“It’s about the idea of having an online workplace, and the engagement people get from being in an online workplace,” he said. “People use voice, video, applications, and the three dimensional context for their workflows.”

Teleplace requires that users download a virtual world client to access the shared virtual workplaces. The virtual world itself can be run on a behind-the-firewall server, or hosted externally on a Teleplace server.

The way the platform works is more like ProtoSphere than Second Life. As with ProtoSphere, a workplace can be any size, and can be linked to any other workplace through the use of teleportation portals. Second Life and OpenSim, by comparison, require that all regions be the same size – 16 virtual acres – and laid out on a map.

However, most Teleplace customers do lay out their virtual campuses in a traditional manner, allowing their users to create a mental map of the space.

“Second Life has that appealing outdoor style, and a lot of businesses have been appreciative of having that geographic correspondence,” Nuyen said. In addition, Teleplace has created some large-scale map-based builds, including a model of the entire Gulf of Mexico.

However, when users fly up into the air in Second Life or OpenSim, they can see the entire world below them, and fly down to get a closer look. In Teleplace, users high in the air aren’t actually looking at the entire virtual Gulf of Mexico – they are looking at a photograph of it. As they fly down, they go through a teleportation portal that takes them to a larger-scale photo – and when they fly down through that, then they teleport to the actual 3D model.

Access controls are linked to the portals, and can be connected to back-end corporate directories. Individual employees or groups of employees can be given access to particular areas on the virtual campus.

The cost for the platform is on a per-user basis, not based on the land area covered. So a 10-person pilot project would cost $7,200 for an entire year, said Nuyens.

This works out to roughly $60 per user per month. According to Nuyens, the pricing is comparable to that of Webex, the leading Web-based collaboration platform.

By comparison, ProtoSphere – which focuses on high-end, custom-designed virtual training – typically costs between $250 to $1000 per user and the total cost for a single deployment can range from five to six figures.

Second Life costs $300 per region per month for an unlimited number of registered users, or about $4,600 for an entire year, with set-up costs. Similar hosting from an OpenSim hosting company like ReactionGrid starts at $25 a month per region, and the software can run in behind-the-firewall private mode.

A behind-the-firewall version of Second Life, Second Life Enterprise, is $55,000 for an unlimited number of users and eight concurrent regions. A behind-the-firewall version of OpenSim from IBM, Virtual Collaboration for Lotus Sametime, is $50,000 for four concurrent regions, and includes back-end integration with corporate applications and directories.

The other major difference between Teleplace and the Second Life or OpenSim platforms is that the latter allow in-world creation and editing of objects. This allows end users to, say, create their own clothes or office furniture.

With Teleplace – and ProtoSphere, Olive, and other common enterprise platforms as well – the design of the world and the objects in it takes place outside the world, in 3D design software. The finished objects can then be imported into the virtual platform.

However, some interaction is possible from inside Teleplace, Nuyens said.

“People can move and rotate objects,” he said.

Teleplace users are more interested in business functionality than in designing sets, he added.

(Image courtesy Teleplace.)

“Our customers are spending their time making sure they can pull together the applications that relate to their workflows,” he said. This includes pulling in RSS feeds, database reports, Office documents, video streams and then recording the sessions.

For document collaboration, users can either put up a document in a read-only format, from their own desktop, or upload it to a central server so that other people can edit as well. For a behind-the-firewall installation, the server would be owned by the customer. For hosted deployments, Teleplace would own the server.

Uploading a document is as simple as dragging it from a desktop into the Teleplace workspace. Here atHypergrid Business, we tried it out – and it is, in fact, that simple. No delays, no menus to wade through, just drag-and-drop and poof, it’s in the workspace.

“The collaboration capabilities within Teleplace were so much more advanced than the virtual worlds technology we were currently using,” said Dick Riedl, professor of education, at Appalachian State, in a statement. “That’s one of the main things that attracted us to Teleplace – it  was pushing the envelope in the exact direction that we wanted to go. And, with Teleplace, it is so easy to get documents into workspaces by just dragging and dropping. Other environments aren’t that easy or they don’t even provide that type of capability. To build objects in Teleplace, all you have to do is create a model or something else easily in Google SketchUp or another 3D program and then just drag and drop it into a workspace.”

The Teleplace servers are not currently SAS 70 compliant, which is what large institutions require of their cloud providers. Salesforce.com, for example, which is used by Merrill Lynch and many other large corporations to track customers information, has SAS 70 certification.

“We have met other requirements from military and government customers, both hosted and behind-the-firewall,” said Nuyens. “We have very formal processes and protocols that say who has access to what when and in what situation.”

But the majority of financial institutions have opted for a behind-the-firewall deployment, Nuyens said.

Teleplace also provides archiving capability and versioning control for the virtual worlds running on its platform.

For end users, though, the biggest difference between the Telplace platform and that of other vendors is the avatars. There’s no big ecosystem of avatar and clothing designers in Teleplace, as there is with the Second Life/OpenSim platforms, and avatars are stiff and formal. Faces don’t move, and there are no casual hand gestures or eye blinks, and no mouth movements synchronized to spoken words.

Users can use their own photos to create avatars, however, and some companies may prefer the more formal approach.

We distribute Teleplace in several European countries, and I am used to small (5-10 participants) workgroup meetings in Teleplace, where all participants can talk, stream their webcam video, share their desktop and edit documents. What I wanted to see yesterday was a Teleplace stress test with a larger crowd. I already knew Teleplace is a great application for remote enterprise and work-group collaboration, but the ability to handle larger audiences (50-100 participants) is important for e-learning applications. Thanks to the meeting management features of Teleplace, which permit one or more moderators taking full control of the meeting and railroading participants as appropriate (for example, muting all mics and unmuting those who raise their hand to ask a question), the webinar ran very smoothly and I am now confident that Teleplace is suitable for e-learning applications with large audiences.

I have taken a 10 min video to show parts of the presentation and to illustrate various examples of using Teleplace for interactive webinars and professional e-learning projects. The video is available on blip.tv and Youtube. The .mp4 file (10 min, 75 MB), is available for download here.

Business Wire: Teleplace 2009 Successes Pave the Way for Growth in 2010

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Teleplace, Inc., a leading provider of trusted collaboration solutions, today announced company successes in 2009 that prepare it for substantial growth this year. Significant achievements include 200 percent year-over-year revenue growth, new customer wins, public presentations by customers showcasing Teleplace’s benefits, and industry award wins.

“Case Study: Appalachian State University Improves Decision Making in a Virtual Environment”

Large corporations and government agencies, such as the Air Force, Army, Navy and Veterans Administration deployed Teleplace in 2009. Representatives from customer organizations presented in public forums last year about their use of Teleplace’s secure virtual workspace technology and the benefits they have achieved from those deployments.

• Chevron gave a keynote address, entitled “When Virtual Worlds Meet the Real World at Chevron” at the 3D Training, Learning and Collaboration conference in September. The presentation discussed details about the safety, reliability and operational performance benefits it has achieved using Teleplace, and how the technology augments and enhances existing communication and collaboration methods.
• Intel spoke on a panel at 3D TLC in September about how it is integrating Teleplace with other technologies to better solve business problems.
• Fidelity profiled its use of Teleplace for agile development team management and collaboration at the O’Reilly Ignite event in Boston in September.

“We experienced tremendous growth in 2009 and the momentum continues to accelerate this year, with more enterprise and government organizations discovering the benefits of our virtual workspace technology,” said Greg Nuyens, CEO of Teleplace. “As the enterprise virtual worlds market continues to evolve, Teleplace is well positioned to maintain a leadership position. Our focus on providing technology that is easy to deploy and use, delivers immediate value and business benefits, and solves real business problems will continue to pay off.”

Teleplace was chosen by AlwaysOn as an OnDC 100 Award Winner, one of the top 100 private companies contributing to the renewed and continued prosperity of our country. The AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts selected Teleplace based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

Work in Teleplace was also recognized by the Air Force, which presented a 2009 Learning Innovation Award in Training to the 81st Training Wing, Keesler AFB, earlier this year. The 81^st was recognized for its work with the MyBase Education and Training prototype, a 3D immersive environment built using Teleplace.

In October, Gartner published: “Case Study: Appalachian State University Improves Decision Making in a Virtual Environment,” which discusses how the university’s Instructional Technology Computers program is using Teleplace to teach courses, “enhance decision making and conduct other important business” (see Research ID Number: G00171175).

Teleplace is the only enterprise-class collaboration platform on the market that enables cross-platform application sharing both behind the firewall and in the cloud. Its unique vPresence™ technology securely combines VoIP, chat, and video with a virtual application command center to accelerate data-centric collaboration. The Teleplace trusted collaboration solution includes support for Active Directory and LDAP, end-to-end encryption, pervasive authentication and access controls, and a wide range of enterprise applications and document formats.

About Teleplace

Teleplace, Inc., formerly Qwaq, creates trusted collaboration solutions to help enterprises manage data-intensive projects and operations across multiple locations. Teleplace is a secure virtual workspace that combines voice, video and chat communications with multi-application and document sharing, enabling more efficient workflows among distributed teams, suppliers, and customers. Teleplace provides application collaboration solutions to more than 100 Global 500 and mid-size customers, including leading firms in the energy, semiconductor, education, manufacturing, financial, healthcare, and government sectors.