You might ask yourself what WWF has to do with VC and HD? In fact you are probably wondering what the acronyms actually stand for and what have they got to do with Wembley.

 

We are talking World Wide Fund for nature, Video Conferencing and High Definition. (I knew that do I hear you say 🙂 ) and all three were being discussed at a Polycom seminar held looking down at the magnificence that is  the pitch at Wembley Stadium.

 

WWF is launching a programme to help businesses cut the number of flights by 1 in 5 and as a leader in the VC game Polycom found it expedient to have representatives along to make a presentation.

 

Obviously Polycom is using Global Warming and the need to reduce carbon footprints as a sales tool for its VC systems but the cynics amongst you should not poo poo this as it is a perfectly valid/nay sensible thing to do. VC does help cut down on business travel and thus helps save the planet as well as reducing costs.

 

One of the reasons I attended was to hear what Polycom was doing with Microsoft on OCS. Turns out they make some of the handsets and are producing a couple of VC products (HDX4000 and HDX8000) that integrate with OCS (more details anon I’m sure).

 

What really interested we was the fact that Microsoft has 11,000 staff working on rich media collaboration, apparently more than the rest of the industry put together. One of the OCS phones doesn’t even have a keypad. Microsoft is saying that you only need your desktop. The Polycom perspective on this is that businesses haven’t gone for desktop VC because of the difficulty of maintaining dispersed resources. It’s hard to see Microsoft getting this wrong.

 

A number of OCS case studies were presented. Gibson guitars reduced calling costs by 75% using OCS.  Prodavka reduced phone costs by 50%

 

There were lots of other interesting facts being bandied around:

 

• China is the second biggest market for VC behind the USA
• The biggest issue facing adoption of VC is the ability to reserve resources. ie room booking
• The average HD system cost is $8k cf $200k for telepresence.
• In 2008 there will be 1500 telepresence systems sold worldwide. By 2012 this is expected to grow to 17,000.
• Interoperability between different vendor systems is still an issue
• 1 long haul flight is equivalent of 12 months driving from a carbon footprint perspective
• Air travel is the fastest growing contributor of CO2 – 3% today, 25% by 2030
• The fastest ways of reducing CO2 generation include power saving data centres, extending networks to home workers and increased usage of collaboration and content sharing tools (video and voice conferencing) as alternative to travel.
• The M4 motorway at Slough is operating at 150% capacity
• The average traffic speed in London is 8 mph – no increase since the horse and cart !
• PWC avoided 1.1 million miles of travel through use of VC resulting in the saving of 198kg of CO2
• BT has claimed £238m benefit to their business by use of VC – £100m based on travel cost benefits and the rest based on productivity improvements including reduced staff sickness
• Nortel has saved $60k a week on travel due to telepresence with 10 systems worldwide
• A Yougov survey in 2007 said 37% of face to face meetings were deemed unnecessary
• If European companies cut travel by 20% there would be a saving of 22m tons of CO2 a year

Finally Polycom played some impressive videos including http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4H0BR_8wy8