Pictured left: Regus videoconferencing facilities; Below: Marriott's GoThere Virtual Meeting facilities; Bottom: Polycom's OTX 300 Telepresence application
There is no doubt that the increased sophistication of videoconferencing has led to a wider general acceptance of the technology. Bandwidth efficiency improvements have also made the technology more acceptable from a cost perspective as has the advent of desktop systems. Gartner predicted last December that by 2015 more than 200 million workers worldwide would have in-house videoconferencing facilities on their desktops. “We have an application that runs on your
PC for about US$100 and then you have bandwidth costs on top so you can have hundreds of units for thousands rather than one for hundreds of thousands,” explains McGroarty. Simon Hunt, Regus global business development director for meeting room, telepresence, video communication, says costs have already come down with high definition units which used to cost around $8,000 two years ago now costing in the region of just $2,000. Naturally, video- conferencing companies such as Polycom, Tata and Cisco want to sell their technology to the business community, but Stewart Harvey, commercial director of travel management company HRG, believes the true state of affairs is being over- shadowed by their hype. “I think it will become more serious but the emphasis should be on what does the client have and trying to help them optimise that rather than trying to sell them an altogether new solution.” He says that almost all of HRG’s clients
available behind boardroom doors. GetThere believes that companies are looking at the whole area of collaboration and whether that means having to travel for face-to-face or the option of virtual meetings. The company is taking the trend seriously and recently agreed a partnership with telecommunications specialist Tata enabling companies to access public and private telepresence facilities via GetThere online booking and collaboration tools. The technology highlights where there
“Some
corporates choose to highlight the soft savings such as the quality of life improvements while others plump for the hard savings”
are virtual meeting facilities available, the potential cost savings and directs travellers to the Tata booking facility. Interestingly, some corporates choose to highlight the soft savings such as the quality of life improvements while others plump for the hard savings – the impact on the bottom line. Employee productivity has also come into focus and businesses are now factoring in the total trip time as well as the cost of the airfare. GetThere director of product marketing Paul Wiley says two factors are currently influencing the purchasing decision – the experience of
telepresence and the return on investment. “Telepresence is something quite different
from what videoconferencing was ten years ago. Once purchasers experience it they see it is completely different. There is a lot of upfront cost but the return on investment is clear and more and more customers are able to justify the cost,” says Wiley. The first phase of GetThere’s partnership is
have videoconferencing but are looking to make more use of it. He sees the TMC’s role as presenting information around who is travelling, why they are travelling and who they are going to see. “Then we can say you can do that with videoconferencing. They might not realise that 30 per cent of their people are travelling to see their own people and that 70 per cent of those are doing it every month. So, can they meet in another way and how can we help them book and manage the logistics of that?” Harvey adds that those companies who have high-end technology are finding demand for the facilities increasing: “Because it’s there and it’s convenient people are taking the room for three hours.” But he also cautions that they may only need it for two so you still have to manage that as well. In general, access to the technology is an
issue with figures showing there are between 3,000 and 4,000 public telepresence units available globally and a further 900,000
to link a company’s internal rooms and then integrate them within travel policy and within the employee’s workflow. There are also plans to link rooms from two separate organisations which work together or have some sort of agreement in place and, finally, to link a company’s facilities with third party or public access facilities. With these sorts of initiatives evolving alongside similar moves from big hotel companies such as Marriott International and Starwood Hotels & Resorts to develop telepresence suites, the access issue is slowly being overcome. There are still barriers that will take longer to overcome such as the increasing demands on bandwidth and getting the different networks to communicate with each other. Once that happens there will be developments in high- quality videoconferencing between mobile and static devices in any location. The maturing of the technology, increased accessibility and integration with day-to-day processes as well as generation Y’s desire for more sophisticated communication technology is already driving that development.
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