Ever since AT&T displayed the first picture phone at the 1964 World’s Fair we’ve all heard that the age of video was near. Guess what? With telepresence, that’s finally happening — even if it’s nearly 50 years late.
For those who’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years, here’s a quick primer: The idea behind telepresence is that meeting participants have the feeling of all being in the same room, sitting around the same conference table, looking eye-to-eye at life-sized participants. From an implementation standpoint, telepresence combines high-definition video conferencing with dedicated room designs featuring lighting, furniture, and camera and sound enhancements all designed to create a virtual-reality environment.
Telepresence has clearly grabbed the attention of IT execs (and their bosses). More than 38% of the enterprise organizations we work with say they’re deploying or planning to deploy telepresence systems. That’s pretty impressive, given that systems typically costs at least $200,000 per room in capital investments, plus bandwidth and management costs that can exceed $5,000 per month per room.
How is it that something that’s so expensive can be so popular during a time of economic recession? Telepresence demonstrates the power of ROI during tough economic times. IT execs tell me they’re primarily justifying telepresence investments in the belief that the lifelike conferencing experience that telepresence provides can finally reduce the need for travel.
But does it? In many cases, yes. We’ve worked with a number of IT executives in global organizations to create ROI models that can provide a return on investment for a telepresence suite in as little as 12 to 18 months.
And that’s just hard savings from eliminating costs of airplane tickets, hotel rooms, meals, etc. The soft costs of not having to travel around the world in terms of productivity and wear and tear on employees is another major factor driving interest in telepresence. That’s particularly important in this time of staff shrinkage — if you’ve only got the bare minimum number of folks on your team, you don’t want them exhausted with travel or out of the office for extended periods.
If you’re looking to build a business case for telepresence, consider the following:
Telepresence generally makes sense in companies with global geographic spread that span multiple time zones. It’s first and foremost a great way to enable internal meetings — connecting colleagues who need to collaborate, but whose only other alternative would have been travel. In this scenario, a company might start with two rooms to enable conferencing between major geographies, then slowly grow deployments to include additional rooms. You can justify the initial expenditure based on reductions in travel expenses, as noted.
But don’t stop there. Over time, you can plan to grow the deployment to include long-term clients and business partners — thereby reaping the rewards of increased interaction and decreased travel time. Some executives say they’ve been able to triple or quadruple the number of clients they can meet with by the use of telepresence. That’s a top-line benefit that results from increased customer interaction, and that sometimes goes far beyond the travel savings.
Bottom line: Telepresence may not be perfect for everyone, but it’s worth assessing as part of your unified communications strategy.
