travel

Unified Communications Can Save Planet Earth

That is my sort of ‘Twitter-friendly’ way of restating the message from the recent report by the WWF (No. Not the Hulk Hogan WWF- the World Wrestling Federation. The report is from the other WWF - the World Wildlife Fund). In a report titled Virtual Meetings and Climate Innovation in the 21st Century, the WWF describes how the increasing adoption of video conferencing and other virtual meeting technologies reduces the carbon output and helps save the environment.

Many organizations are cutting back on travel and leveraging unified communications to enhance their ability to meet and collaborate in real-time no matter where in the world the participants might be. Granted, most are doing so for purely fiscal reasons rather than environmental altruism. Travel is expensive and the economy is hurting many companies. But, the result is the same.

The GreenBiz.com blog though points out that there is still significant room for improvement. They cite “concerns about effectiveness of the technology; limited access to bandwidth and equipment; weak vendor incentives to push large-scale use; misalignment of user incentives and; a lack of strategic impetus in many organizations; and poor information about the benefits” as factors behind the slow adoption of these technologies.

The combined message then is this: we are headed in the right direction, but we have a ways to go and we could be going faster. Unified communications helps organizations operate more efficiently and save money in a variety of ways. As a bonus to the benefits inherent in unified communications, it also reduces carbon emissions and helps save the planet. Seems like a win-win.

Want Stimulus? Get Unified Communications

Pssst. Over here. Keep this just between us, ok? The global economy is trashed. Shhhh.

If you haven’t heard, the United States and the rest of the world are in a recession bordering on depression. In the United States unemployment is the highest its been in decades. The stock market is the lowest it has been in years. The federal and state governments are scrambling to find solutions and turn things around.

President Barack Obama and the United States federal government have put forth a stimulus / recovery package to help get things back on track. Businesses that are looking for ways to cut costs and increase the bottom line can create their own stimulus package by investing in unified communications.

Making the move from traditional voice to VoIP has a number of cost advantages that could represent significant savings for many companies. For some companies though, one of the biggest expenses is travel. Flying people for onsite meetings involves airfare, rental cars, hotel lodging, per diem dining at restaurants, and more.

Companies can minimize, or even eliminate, those expenses by embracing unified communications and leveraging the conferencing functionality. Unified communications makes it simple to schedule and host a voice conference call. If documents or images need to be shared, a Live Meeting or similar collaboration session can be used to enable participants to see each other’s computer desktops. For situations where face to face meetings are desired video conferencing can accomplish virtually the same goal at a fraction of the cost.

Do your part to turn the economy around by investing in unified communications and creating your own stimulus package.

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Cut Travel Expenses With Unified Communications

Businesses spend a tremendous amount of money on travel expenses. I am not just referring to ridiculous, stupid, borderline criminal travel expenses like the $440,000 insurance giant AIG spent to send 10 executives to a luxury spa after borrowing $85 Billion from US taxpayers (or the $343,000 they subsequently spent and tried to hide for another luxury trip after begging for an additional $40 Billion from the government). No- that is an extreme example where the company should actually lose all of their customers and executives should be held financially and criminally liable for exhibiting such brazen disregard for common sense.

So, AIG aside, let’s talk about normal companies, conducting normal business, and incurring normal travel expenses. American Express predicts that the average cost for a domestic business trip in the United States will increase by 2.8% to $1,139. Their prediction for international travel is that it will increase by 4.3% to $3,556. Depending on the size of the company and the frequency of travel, those expenses add up quickly.

If we assume a small to medium company with 5 sales people who travel to meet with prospective customers and sell new business, and an additional 25 who travel to deliver the products and services sold by the sales people, there are 30 people hopping around the country or globe. If they average 20 trips each per year, and 10% (or 2 trips per year) are international trips, then based on the travel expenses predicted by American Express the company will spend almost $830,000 on travel in 2009.

In addition to the tangible costs, travel introduces other complexities that can be avoided. Airlines oversell their flights and cancel frequently due to weather, risking leaving business travelers stranded and unable to make important meetings. Hotels are often overbooked. Employees are forced to be away from their homes and families. The list goes on.

Unified Communications can solve those problems. Perhaps that is why unified communications is one of the few technologies that seems to be growing in this abysmal economy. Companies are examining whether travel is really necessary when video conferencing, desktop sharing, and other virtual meeting technologies exist.

The savings will be substantially more than the investment in deploying unified communications, and the unified communications investment will continue to return dividends years after the initial investment. The actual delivery of products and services may still require sending personnel to customer sites to implement, but our hypothetical business can cut their travel by as much as 75% per year by leveraging unified communications and virtual meetings.  Over the course of three years, that would represent a return on investment for unified communications of more than $1.5 million.

Again- your mileage may vary. This is just a pretend company I made up for my example. What if your company has 50 sales people and 150 service delivery personnel? What it your company is HP, or IBM, or BT- with thousands of employees traveling all over the world to sell and deliver services? Take a look at what your company spends each year on travel, and then examine how much of that travel is really necessary and how much could be replaced by unified communications. Odds are good that the cost savings will be significant and that the business case for unified communications will justify itself.

Cutting Costs With UC

Companies love meetings. There are so many meetings it is often amazing that anything ever gets done. There are meetings to plan the initial meeting, progress meetings, milestone meetings, budget meetings, etc., etc. It is insane. What is more insane though is how frequently companies fly everyone to one location to meet in person. On top of the impact to productivity of constantly meeting to begin with, the company incurs expenses for airfare or vehicle mileage, hotel lodging, meals, and other miscellaneous travel expenses. Depending on how many people are attending, it is possible that a single meeting- and its associated travel and lodging expenses- could pay for the lion’s share of a unified communications implementation. Part of the beauty and value of UC is that it helps parties scattered around the globe communicate more effectively. This includes real-time meetings and can represent a significant time and money savings for the company, especially given the current price of fuel.