Meetings at the speed of light

By Jeff Prestel, General Manager, Video Business Unit, BT Conferencing

Most cars these days can tell you the average speed of your journey. Some work out when a new journey is starting, in other cases you tell them yourself. Either way, they just divide the total distance travelled by the time that’s elapsed since you set off – including any stops you may have made on the way.

That got me to thinking: What is the average speed of a business meeting? And does it vary over a career?

Imagine every meeting began and ended at your desk, for instance. Meetings at your desk would involve no movement at all, so their average speed would be zero. Meetings with colleagues in the same building would be slightly faster. The distances travelled would be small and you’d walk both there and back.

Looked at this way, meetings would tend to speed up as people’s careers progress. To get to and from meetings with customers and suppliers, for example, they have to use public transport or cars. The more senior or more expert they get, the greater the chance they’ll have to fly.

At C-suite level, meeting speeds can get even higher. Executive jets cut out waits at airports, and meetings get shorter as people try and pack more and more into their working day.
Back in 1985, for example, the New York Times interviewed a high flyer who had crossed the Atlantic 181 times on the supersonic airliner, Concorde. “I get to my office in London at 7am and do an hour and a half of work,” he said. “I get the 10:30 Concorde to New York and work a full day in my New York office. Then I take a subsonic home, and I'm back in the office 24 hours after I left.'' [1]

If you work it out, the average speed of this executive’s working day was almost 145mph (235kph). Had he had the chance to travel at the speed of light, no doubt he would have jumped at it! Unfortunately, no one invented the sort of teleportation machine that featured in the cult TV series Star Trek. But we have now developed an alternative. It’s called telepresence, and it’s fast establishing itself as the way of choice for executives and other business people to meet.

Telepresence conferencing systems are simple to use. All you have to do is walk into what looks like an ordinary meeting room. There, you’ll find the people you want to meet ‘sitting’ around an ordinary meeting table. You can’t shake hands with them – they could be in similar meeting rooms hundreds or thousands of kilometres away – but you can make eye contact, get a genuine sense of their personality and, if you ask a tricky question, even see the beads of sweat on their forehead as they contemplate their replies. Indeed, their presence is so life-like that you very soon forget they aren’t actually there.

Until recently, though, there was a problem. To create a ‘near real life’ experience, telepresence facilities had to be connected to the same virtual private network (VPN). By and large, that meant they had to be in offices occupied by the same company.

Even so, the technology proved its worth. The telepresence meeting rooms we supplied to Media-Saturn – Europe's largest retailer of consumer electronics – allow people at its offices in Germany, France and Russia to work together exactly as they could if they were all in the same building, for example. The solution we are providing to SWIFT, the messaging provider that connects more than 8,600 financial institutions, will link offices spread across Europe, the US and Asia.

Now, the ‘in house’ restriction has been lifted. BT has launched BT Global Video Exchange – a world-first service that allows high-definition video-conferencing sessions to be set up between compatible facilities connected to separate BT-provided VPNs without any loss of quality or any compromise in security. As a result, people from different organisations can now meet face to face without incurring the various costs of business travel – fares, hotel bills and, critically, time.

Given the state of the global economy, this is excellent news. The multi-site firms we deal with tell us their enterprise-wide telepresence conferencing systems cut spending on business travel by an average of more than five per cent. On that basis alone, they achieve a return on their investment within 12 months.

But cost savings are just one of the benefits our customers tell us about. Executives and experts spend less time on the road, which makes them much more available to the customers, colleagues and others who need their time and attention. Decisions get made faster, and that helps businesses compete. Time-to-market and time-to-deliver are reduced.
Conferencing is also greener and safer than travel. The equipment involved generates much less CO2 than planes, trains and automobiles. And while conferencing systems are like other IT systems – they can ‘crash’ from time to time – there’s little chance that anyone will be injured and unable to work as a result.

Such benefits may be harder to quantify than straightforward cost savings, but they are no less significant.

So if you’re looking for a faster and more cost-effective way to get from meeting to meeting, why not give telepresence a try? Thanks to our global fibre optic network, you won’t just travel ‘business first’, you’ll do so at the speed of light.

Footnote
BT Global Video Exchange was launched in the United States in September 2008 and in Europe a month later. It is expected to be available in Asia Pacific towards the end of 2009.
The service was named ‘Best Business Video Project of the Year’ in the Cisco Networkers Awards 2009.

[1] ‘The Concorde's new styling’, New York Times, June 2, 1985, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A05E7D81739F931A35755C0A963948260&sec=travel&spon=&pagewanted=all