In As city planners across India try and come to grips with the problem of decongesting cities and taking traffic off the roads, there is a statistic that could shed some light on how to get around these issues. A recent survey, commissioned by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) has revealed that US and UK businesses that have substituted a fraction of their business travel with Telepresence can cut CO2 emissions by nearly 5.5 million metric tons. This is the greenhouse gas equivalent of removing more than a million passenger vehicles from the road over the course of a year. If this were to continue until 2020, the economic benefits would translate into nearly $19 billion by the year 2020.
What is Telepresence?
Telepresence is high definition videoconferencing which offers a lifelike and immersive face-to-face meeting experience. It scores highly over traditional videoconferencing solutions in terms of its sheer audio-video quality. In many ways it is actually better than being there.
Organisations have been quick to realise the benefits of this technology. Senior executives are viewing Telepresence not only as a tool for saving business travel costs but also as a means for improving employee productivity while speeding up decision making in a globalized work environment.
Telepresence is of particular importance to companies such as Tata Communications which has over 80 offices in 52 countries with an employee base of around 6,500 people. Since deploying Telepresence in 2007, we have seen a reduction in corporate travel spend by 10 per cent, despite the fact that headcount has increased by 30 per cent. Two years after the first Telepresence rooms were deployed executive travel declined by 39 per cent; this decrease translates into an overall reduced carbon footprint of 490 tons. This saving would be equivalent to the carbon sequestration from the atmosphere of about 80,000 mature pine trees over the period of one year. There is an additional spin off for employees and senior executives thanks to reduced travel time, resulting in more personal time.
We are now seeing many more companies across the world adopting Telepresence. What are the drivers for this?
Better accessibility
While setting up Telepresence suites has become affordable for service providers, customers too now have access to these rooms at more affordable rates. This has been due to the re-engineering of the business model that has seen the public room model of Telepresence services take shape. Service providers have tied up with hotel groups to offer these services on a pay-per-use basis with tariffs being framed on a charge-per-hour model. Through these public rooms, located in hotels across the worlds major business cities, the technology is made accessible, at an affordable hourly charge, to companies and individuals.
Greater interconnectivity
Global interconnectivity has improved dramatically due to increased cooperation around standards between vendors as well as the establishment of managed gateways and international exchange facilities by global telecom operators. These gateways and exchange facilities expand the Telepresence network by allowing customers of different service providers to be connected with each other, anywhere across the globe.
The public room model of Telepresence has had a number of benefits with these serving as a link with the rest of the world during crises.
Greater RoI (Return on Investment)
As increasing numbers of companies adopt Telepresence, and the reach of their network expands through inter-carrier Exchange services and access to public rooms, opportunities to leverage the technology to drive business benefit grow. As the benefits of adopting Telepresence grow, and get pulled forward in time, additional investment in more rooms becomes easier to justify, driving a further expansion of the network in a virtuous circle. That a network technology becomes increasingly valuable to all users as each new user joins the network is a well known phenomenon called Metcalfes Law, and it suggests that Telepresence is on an exponential growth curve. Service providers like Tata Communications are further accelerating this process by offering a variety of Managed Services, including cloud-based infrastructure-as-as-service model, and creative financial models to help customers reduce cost. For customers, lower investment and increasing returns mean greater RoI, and for the industry, this means growth.
A game changer in communications technology:
Telepresence is truly a game changer when it comes to communication technologies. Organisations today are operating in an increasingly globalised economy with enhanced competition and reduced time to recoup investments. In order to create a sustainable competitive advantage in the market, it is vital for decision makers within business to recognise the impact that Telepresence can have across an organizations business ecosystem, delivering a wide range of benefits to core business operations.
While Telepresence is by no means the only way to reduce a firms carbon footprint, it is an immediate and tangible way in which organizations and individuals can make a significant difference. The good news is that, if properly deployed, Telepresence will have a significant impact on an organisations bottom line by reducing travel costs and improving employee productivity, giving frequent travellers a better work-life balance. And yes, increase the possibility of taking one million cars off the roads annually.
* The author is Vice President, Telepresence Managed Services, Tata Communications.
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