Telepresence: Reducing the Impact of Business Travel

By leveraging the power of the Internet, telepresence provides a viable alternative to business travel. A generation or more beyond video conferencing, telepresence creates an environment where participants interact in a shared boardroom, even though they might be separated by tens of thousands of miles. By replacing the need to transport humans to meetings around the globe, it's fast becoming the ideal way to lower corporate carbon footprints and protect the environment, creating a significant return on investment and boosting productivity.

In its place, there's now the fully immersive experience of telepresence. Using integrated high-definition video, high-fidelity audio and end-to-end services, telepresence creates a virtual meeting place where participants seem like they are in the same room and every nuance is apparent.

Telepresence helps companies achieve what previous communications technologies could not. It enables business people to build stronger relationships with their partners, without the need for travel. By enabling users to express and perceive the visual cues and changes in voice tone that convey subtle meaning and subtext, it engenders candor. After all, it's through this candor and understanding that we cultivate the trust and confidence that are the basis for long-standing business relationships. In short, telepresence is built on the understanding that good relationships are the foundation of good business.

The quality of the technology and the experience itself initially inspires awe among telepresence participants. But within minutes, the technology becomes transparent and the face-to-face reality of the experience takes hold. A common observation shared by many participants is that "you forget that your customer isn't really across the table from you."

The range of telepresence solutions is broad. At the high end are on-site facilities in which wall-sized video displays provide a full-sized portal into the customer's or colleague's office and surround sound lets users pinpoint exactly who's speaking. At the other extreme (although the term "low end" never really applies), portable solutions take a more modular approach, relying on high-definition monitors and surround-sound audio.

While telepresence creates an environment for interpersonal exchange, it also offers advantages that "real" face-to-face meetings can't. All digital resources are immediately at hand and documents and presentations can be shared and reviewed instantly. There's no reason to say "I'll send you that file when I'm back online and we can review it at our next meeting."

So with telepresence, all resources are at your disposal. All key attendees, even those on other continents, are there in the room and able to fully participate. High-definition multimedia telepresence solutions create that level of immersion. It's an environment that needs to be experienced to be fully appreciated.

With many shareholders and stakeholders calling for increased corporate transparency, telepresence offers another advantage. Meetings can be recorded for later podcast, Webcast, training or to comply with transparency legislation (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley Act).

Selecting a Telepresence Solution

A range of telepresence solutions is available now and the options can be overwhelming. Making the right choice requires the right selection criteria. Evaluating high-definition multimedia telepresence solutions requires a different set of criteria than is normally used to assess traditional telecommunications and data purchases. With telepresence, it's critical to equally evaluate the network, products, and managed services that comprise the complete solution.

Three key items to consider are:

1. Quality of experience - Most people who have experienced high-definition multimedia telepresence say it creates an immersive environment far beyond traditional video conferencing. Experiencing a solution firsthand is critical to any telepresence evaluation, and it's the only way to set appropriate benchmarks for what you deem to be a real-life experience.
Immersive telepresence rooms should be engineered for the highest-quality possible human experience. All elements of the facility's design - sound, lighting, furniture, monitors, controls, camera placement, speaker placement, and integration of laptop presentations - must come together to deliver an experience that makes all participants feel they are in the same room, regardless of their geographic location. In addition, the total experience must account for the complete usage cycle of the facility, from the initial booking of the room to the actual meeting and subsequent set-up for the next meeting (see Management, below).

2. Interoperability and longevity - Whatever the choice of solution, it needs to be compatible with the telepresence equipment that your customers and colleagues have implemented or may deploy at a later date. A network and hardware based on open standards ensure the broadest interoperability, avoid vendor lock-in, and help to "future proof" the system for years to come.
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the industry-leading open standard designed to facilitate multimedia sessions over the Internet. It enables various existing telecommunication protocols (e.g., those for instant messaging and telephony) to interact smoothly and effectively, thus enabling them to be unified into integrated multimedia applications. SIP forms the foundation of many Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), multimedia, and leading telepresence solutions.
Because SIP was jointly created by a group of leading software and hardware providers, it has been widely adopted by many best-of-class vendors. This helps ensure all products that use, and adhere to, this protocol, regardless of vendor, will work together. And because SIP doesn't define or limit which protocols it will integrate, it is also capable of embracing yet-to-be-invented protocols, so that it is a highly future-proof standard.

3. Management - Telepresence is becoming more and more accessible, but that doesn't mean the day-to-day operation is trivial. A complete solution that achieves your benchmarks for quality of experience involves not just hardware, software, and network, but ongoing monitoring and maintenance to ensure a high-fidelity meeting experience for users.

A managed service ensures a telepresence session is as easy as booking a meeting room and showing up. When participants walk in, regardless of location, there's no dialing into an audio bridge or need for a user's manual. It's as though you are walking into a boardroom, greeting one another, and sitting around the table together. When the meeting is over, you simply leave the room. But you still have the option of reviewing the recorded meeting or converting it into a Webcast or podcast for later use.

Using dedicated IT and facilities employees can be expensive, while a managed service provides an all-encompassing, cost-effective solution. With a managed service, you gain: 1) high-value expertise for a predictable monthly fee; 2) a proactive approach to potential hardware and software problems; and

3) a single point of contact to resolve problems, should they arise. As a case in point, Nortel Multimedia Telepresence Solutions includes turnkey services integral to creating an immersive user experience by ensuring higher quality, better reliability, and integrated collaboration to deliver new levels of productivity for its customers.

The Value of Telepresence
Reducing the carbon footprint

At a time when the total global volume of business travel is increasing, even travel-industry leaders like Carlson Wagonlit are recognizing the need for businesses to "travel smarter." Despite the relatively small size of the air-transport industry, the fact is, it accounts for four to nine percent of all the climate change impact of human activity, according to the David Suzuki Foundation.

The Suzuki Foundation explains this disproportionate environmental harm as follows: when jet fuel is burned, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, sulphate, soot, and water vapor are all produced as exhaust emissions. While carbon dioxide is the best-known greenhouse gas, the other emissions actually pose greater threats. As a result of a series of chemical reactions and atmospheric effects, the climate impact of aircraft is two to four times greater than the effect of their carbon dioxide emissions alone.

Environmental groups and institutions have recognized the use of Internet-based solutions, including telepresence, as clear and obvious alternatives to air travel.

Generating ROI

Corporate financial officers struggle to keep travel budgets in check at a time when American Express Business Travel predicts the total cost of a business trip will increase between six and seven percent. Nonetheless, companies balk at telepresence solutions because of the relatively high one-time start-up costs. But these costs are rarely a valid barrier to adoption.

ROI calculations show that even an organization with modest travel expenses can quickly amortize and justify the investment. One company cited in a 2007 report from Nemertes Research found the cost of installing multiple high-end dedicated telepresence facilities ($250,000 to $500,000 per room) and the cost of a managed service ($35,000 per month) would be covered by as little as a two-to-five percent reduction in total global travel by the organization.

Even smaller companies can justify telepresence facilities. Consider a company that, on a monthly basis, has an average of five participants traveling three hours by air to attend an average of ten monthly meetings, each of which is four hours long. The company would achieve cost recovery on three telepresence rooms (each capable of facilitating two to eight people) in 45 days if only 25 percent of these meetings were converted to telepresence sessions.

Improving Productivity

Corporate managers struggle to recoup lost time and productivity. Employees whose value to the company is in their ability to collaborate, persuade and lead are often spending more time incommunicado in transit than they are in meetings. In a global marketplace where real-time decision-making is a necessity, the time lag imposed by travel can actually impede a company's competitive advantage. When travel is removed from business processes, decision-making is faster, collaboration is easier to achieve and, as a result, creativity and productivity increase.

Telepresence in Summary

With telepresence, corporations can forego all the negative impacts of business travel. In fact, with judicious planning and the assistance of a managed service provider, businesses can help the environment, boost productivity, and demonstrate an ROI by adopting this technology.

Telepresence is at a level of maturity where the actual risks are low and the return on investment is typically faster than expected. The real challenge for many organizations will be to recognize that it's "the right thing to do" and to champion the initiative to ensure its adoption and success.

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