Robin Johansen, CIO of Beca Group, raves about the business and environmental benefits of video communications systems after the scientific services company made a sizable investment in Tandberg videoconferencing technologies.

“This stuff just works once you have it installed in a managed network,” says Johansen.

“Our biggest challenge so far is simply ensuring all of our meeting spaces have patching in place to support connections to the LAN for videoconferencing. It is now much more important to lock that down than previously because our staff expect to simply step up, plug in the endpoint and start a video conference.”

And he is delighted with the sheer number of people doing just that – staff enthusiasm for video communications has pushed Beca beyond its initial videoconferencing brief and into videoconferencing with international partner organisations as well as staff. Beca is recording in excess of one hundred cumulative hours of video conferencing and several hundred unique video conferences each month.

“If our people didn’t find that videoconferencing was working for them, they simply wouldn’t use it and we would not see growing demand. Our stats show that we have strong demand and it is growing.”

He says while it is clear that videoconferencing has a place in client communications, Beca is sensitive to avoid “foisting” videoconferencing onto clients as a substitute for face to face meetings.

“Our initial intent was simply to provide better communication between our teams which are geographically dispersed and include Asia and our UK offices. But Beca has long used virtual teams to deliver best value to our clients and we felt videoconferencing would improve our performance. This has been borne out,” says Johansen.

The green factor
Many companies are keen to reduce their carbon footprint for the business kudos it affords, the doors that subsequently open, and the appeal it has for staff. Many companies also have a genuine concern for the environment and while not all green compliance and certification requirements make sense, travel reduction generally does.

Johansen says Beca has learned videoconferencing makes “a very real contribution” to reducing travel costs and the loss of productive time that travel creates, and has observed improved dynamics in virtual teams, improved communications with partners and “vastly improved” audibility in conference settings. He estimates payback on Beca’s video communications investment will occur in less than 12 months on reduced travel costs alone.

Another commercial organisation reaping the green benefits of video is Telecom. The reasons behind a decision to videoconference where possible are published in Telecom’s annual report and its internal travel policy, which guides employees to look at using alternative meeting tools before considering travelling.

Telecom has also instituted “no fly” months in which any travel during certain periods must be justified first.

“It’s great to see video conferencing use increasing, both internally at Telecom and by our customers. We are using video conferencing to reduce air travel and thus our carbon emissions and it’s good to see customers using this service to do the same,” says Steve Kerr, Telecom’s environmental manager. Telecom uses the Polycom brand of videoconferencing meeting rooms and desktop systems and predictably manages its own video and audio bridges to connect staff, customers and partners.

Internal videoconferencing connections operate at data speeds of 512 kbps over ISDN and while 35 general managers have videoconferencing on their desktops, most staff communicate from rooms designed for group videoconferencing.

With offices throughout New Zealand and Australia the company books and manages 550 internal videoconferences per month in addition to ad hoc “point-to-point” calls, which amount to another 100 meetings per month. A further 120 conferences are undertaken between Telecom and external customers.

Nicki Carter, a sales executive for ProVision Technologies emphasises the uptake of videoconferencing to support internal meetings. She says ProVision has a number of clients who used to meet monthly or bi-monthly and ship staff to one location, often providing accommodation, food and taxis for a meeting of four hours.

She says one client used to require three managers to drive from Auckland to Northland once a week for a two-hour meeting. With videoconferencing, they now talk two or three times a week and important decisions are no longer put off for that once-weekly face-to-face meeting.

“As well as the up-front costs [of travel] there is the greater hidden cost of lost productivity. Being able to just walk from your office to a meeting room in your building, have a scheduled or even unscheduled meeting and be back at your desk in five minutes is far preferable to wasting time at airport terminals,” says Carter.

So why wait?
Despite a plethora of press and whitepapers supporting the technological viability and business case for video communications, many corporate businesses have taken a rain check on implementation (although government and educational organisations are well ahead in this area).

The reason for private sector reticence probably comes down to legacy issues including high bandwidth costs, budget priorities and a lack of understanding around how to optimise and separate bandwidth so that video traffic is optimised for quality yet incapable of affecting voice traffic across the network.

And while the desire to unify communication systems and achieve environmental gains is driving businesses to re-evaluate these early perceptions, it can take time, say vendors. “Customers still ask us whether video communication systems will work over a public internet connection – of course they do,” says Chris Stewart, managing director for Asnet Technologies which supplies the Polycom brand of videoconferencing systems.

“When a VPN is used, the quality of video calls can be managed, as can firewall traversals. There are no technological barriers; there is only the need for a business case,” says Stewart.

Jaron Burbidge, Tandberg’s New Zealand area manager, says videoconferencing systems can deliver the same level of quality for national and international calls over public IP as long as there is good Internet bandwidth. “We don’t see an awful lot of packet loss. In the last couple of years we have been running demos between Australia and New Zealand over public internet and there’s nothing to be afraid of. Lots of our customers have offices overseas and just use internet VPN connections for videoconferencing,” says Burbidge.

He says commercial customers are adamant they don’t want video to become another technology silo requiring specialist training and users, and want to integrate email and voice environments with video to create a unified communications solution.

“They say: ‘I have Exchange and Outlook and Telecom OneOffice or an Avaya voice system in my environment; how can I leverage the investment I have in that and still get video?’ So we show them how simple it is to use Outlook and calendaring applications to book a videoconference,” says Burbidge.

Because network readiness is still important, video systems should still be trialled before customers commit, says Burbidge. And Johansen underscores this, saying network bandwidth has been a concern for Beca from the beginning, which is why the company designed an electronic booking system to limit the amount of bandwidth devoted to videoconferencing at any given time.

Ian Darby, business manager of videoconferencing for Agile New Zealand which supplies videoconferencing systems and technologies from Sony and others, says Agile’s customers want to know how to integrate boardroom and desktop video systems and how to migrate from existing video equipment to the all-popular high definition systems everyone wants.

He says underlying infrastructure technologies like those from Codian can be a big help in getting legacy technologies to work together and in managing unified video communication systems.

For more information, vendors, resources and case studies visit the Unified Comms / VoIP / Conferencing Solutions Research Pavilion

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VIDEOCONFERENCING BUYERS GUIDE

Provider

Brands

Key Reference Sites

Contact Details

asnet Technologies

Telecom
Telepaediatric Network

info@asnettechnologies.co.nz
0800 POLYCOM
www.asnettechnologies.co.nz

Canon

Beca Group

multimedia@canon.co.nz
0800 222 666
www.canon.co.nz

Agile

Ministry of Fisheries

info@agile.co.nz
09 4770550
www.agile.co.nz