I really don’t want to start off by referring to the economic crisis, but the facts are that we are seeing the impact of it everywhere.

One should not only consider video conferencing as a means to save cost but also as a means to enhance your business and make it more competitive.  For instance being able to make decisions more quickly, saving staff time, improving internal training and working as one company.

But if you start to count the cost of travel, even a local economy flight averages at around R 2000 and I often hear of local companies that need to have monthly staff meetings at their head office accounting for 30 such flights.  Although this may be extreme, this single meeting can cost R 60 000 in flights, let alone the other T&E.  Add to that other ad hoc travel and the hard business case for video conferencing becomes a strong reality.

I’ll be the first to say that one should not banish air travel and lock it away in the history books as a bad idea of a century gone by – not at all.  There simply is no substitute for face to face communications and the relationships and understanding that they build.  However, as per the case above, those face to face company meetings could happen every quarter with the monthly meetings happening via video conferencing.  That will account for a R 480 000 (8 * R 60 000) annual saving on flights costs by simply working a bit smarter.

Video conferencing also gives you the opportunity to connect workgroups that previously simply didn’t have a strong business case to justify travel and allow project teams to meet much more often.  Whether it is connecting teams in different cities or connecting people in the same city purely to save on frustrating commute in traffic it is clear that technology can lend a hand to keep us sane by providing flexibility to meet our work obligations.

So the crux of the matter is the quality of the experience and the cost of implementing video conferencing.  This is where Microsoft Unified Communications come into its own.  If you haven’t seen the Microsoft RoundTable (Video Conferencing Hardware – see pic above left) before, then make sure you go to www.microsoft.com/southafrica/roundtable for more on its capabilities as well as a list of resellers that sell the device in South Africa.  It honestly comes in at a fraction of the cost of traditional video conferencing. 

The total cost is not only the device; you will also need an on premise Microsoft Office Communications Server to provide the back-end video functionality and PC’s running Microsoft Live Meeting (see the pic above right), but even so it is video conferencing for the masses.  Besides the Office Communications Server is capable of much more than just video conferencing and is your ticket to full Unified Communications and connecting your business with presence, voice and instant messaging.  Best of all, you should enjoy a great experience on your existing network meaning that you don’t need to install special ISDN lines or have dedicated infrastructure.

I am yet to demonstrate this technology to a customer or partner and not have them blown away by the experience, even though my video conferencing server is in Dublin!  You only need the Microsoft RoundTable device if you have more than person at the same location / meeting room.  People can connect to the meeting wherever they are simply by using their Laptops / PCs and if they want to send video a webcam will do. 

I have a whitepaper that outlines some of the business benefits realised by companies who have deployed conferencing and collaboration solutions. It provides market data on the growth of unified communications (UC) and collaboration systems as well as end user feedback on which groups receive the most benefit from these solutions. It also describes factors companies will want to consider when selecting and deploying a conferencing solution, including accounting for all conferencing costs and how to look at ROI, which may go beyond just hard dollars. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis will show that an integrated hosted conferencing solution can save up to 95% of the costs of using separate audio, video, and Web conferencing service providers and that a premise-based UC solution can save as much as 97% when compared to using separate hosted service providers for an organization’s conferencing needs.  Let me know and I’ll email it through to you.

Please let me know if you found this useful and would like to see more on this topic by commenting on this post.

--D