Looks like the CO2 and cost benefits of teleconferencing is making some headlines.
Taking Care of Business
By Joel Makower
How's your travel budget these days?
If you're like just about everybody I talk to lately, your budget ain't what it used to be. Sky-high fuel prices have grounded many road warriors, as companies seek to ease the bite of rising travel costs during a time of economic uncertainty. And yet there's a need to be face to face, if not actually press the flesh. And so "telepresence" — the term for what used to be called "videoconferencing" — is taking off so that we don't have to.
It's not just fuel costs that have given telepresence a lift. The technology has improved and sophisticated new offerings from IT companies like Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Nortel, and Tandberg allow people in disparate cities and time zones to sit around the same table — or, at least, appear to do so, using specially design meeting spaces married to broadband communications technologies. It's still not the same as being there, but it's a reasonable approximation.
And companies are adopting, as we report in this week's story about Deloitte, which recently signed a multi-year, multimillion-dollar contract to bring telepresence to 130 locations worldwide. Deloitte believes the technology will save time, money, and carbon emissions.
But it's potentially more than that. Last year, the chief information officer from one global company told me that his firm's sales team performance rose when the team started utilizing telepresence, thus reducing travel. It turns out that salespeople are happier when they get to stay at home with their families, and happier salespeople tend to be more productive and profitable.
Could it be that the green solution also makes the most bottom-line sense? It's certainly not the first time, or the last.
— Joel Makower, GreenBiz Executive Editor
By Andrew Charlesworth
July 11, 2008
Business consultancy megalith Deloitte has signed up with communications equipment supplier Nortel for the latter’s complete package of managed videoconferencing services to cut the consultancy’s travel bill and reduce its carbon footprint.
The annual value of the contract has not been released but is reported to be multi-year and worth millions of dollars. Nor will Deloitte divulge how much it expects to save from the scheme.
Under the agreement with Nortel, Deloitte's global organization and its member firms in up to 130 locations worldwide will be able to obtain telepresence and open standards-based videoconferencing services.
"Being able to meet clients and colleagues in real time without travel is an efficient, effective and environmentally considerate way to address their needs, " said Yezdi Pavri, managing partner at Deloitte Canada's Toronto office.
According to Nortel’s calculations, a company spending $23 million annually on travel can use telepresence to recover as many as 385,000 hours of lost productivity, reduce its carbon footprint by up to 4,200 tonnes and save up to $7 million a year.
One company cited in Building the Successful Virtual Workplace, a 2007 Nemertes Research benchmark of IT executive best practices, found that it could cover the cost of multiple, dedicated, high-end telepresence facilities and a managed telepresence service with as little as a two to 3 percent reduction in international travel.
Nortel has also launched the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator, an online utility which allows customers to model network deployment scenarios and calculate associated cooling costs and local power costs by region and other factors.
The annual value of the contract has not been released but is reported to be multi-year and worth millions of dollars. Nor will Deloitte divulge how much it expects to save from the scheme.
Under the agreement with Nortel, Deloitte's global organization and its member firms in up to 130 locations worldwide will be able to obtain telepresence and open standards-based videoconferencing services.
"Being able to meet clients and colleagues in real time without travel is an efficient, effective and environmentally considerate way to address their needs, " said Yezdi Pavri, managing partner at Deloitte Canada's Toronto office.
According to Nortel’s calculations, a company spending $23 million annually on travel can use telepresence to recover as many as 385,000 hours of lost productivity, reduce its carbon footprint by up to 4,200 tonnes and save up to $7 million a year.
One company cited in Building the Successful Virtual Workplace, a 2007 Nemertes Research benchmark of IT executive best practices, found that it could cover the cost of multiple, dedicated, high-end telepresence facilities and a managed telepresence service with as little as a two to 3 percent reduction in international travel.
Nortel has also launched the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator, an online utility which allows customers to model network deployment scenarios and calculate associated cooling costs and local power costs by region and other factors.
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