Faced with a bleak business outlook, some real questions arise: How can we manage on a tight budget? How do you maintain contact with your subsidiaries, partners and customers? As a result, and because business travel is going through a lean period, companies are being tempted to use videoconferencing more often, and in some cases to introduce it. But videoconferencing still has an unflattering image: a dull meeting room, rough sound, discrepancies between sound and image, and so on. However, today the tools are really up and running," explains François Moïse, Unified Communications and Collaboration Marketing Director at Cisco Systems, "and we've achieved satisfactory quality, especially with the arrival of high definition.
The explosion of data networks, the commoditisation of information technologies and the desire to simplify them in order to make them more widespread are all factors in favour of what is known as Unified Communications. These factors are not just economic and technical. For large companies, the social responsibility dimension is increasingly important," explains Michel Dudet, head of innovation for IP services at Orange Business Services. Reducing the fatigue and stress associated with travel has always been a concern. But what's new is the desire to reduce our own carbon footprint. As a result, videoconferencing has become a growth sector, with average annual growth since 2003 approaching 30 %. With managerial practices tending to become standardised, the disembodiment of relationships no longer poses a major cultural problem. Especially as, with the new systems, all the non-verbal aspects of communication are perfectly, or almost perfectly, conveyed," adds Michel Dupuis. Or almost," adds Michel Dudet.
However, videoconferencing is not intended to replace human contact. In the context of business meetings, it serves to speed up the decision-making process. Because nothing can replace the handshake, the face-to-face meeting, the dinner and the evening that follows... It is presented as a productivity tool that can be used to motivate the sales force and get a message across to teams, while measuring its impact.
Quality and simplicity
The tools we use have progressed a great deal, and are keeping pace with changing needs. For example, image and sound have long coexisted with document sharing. In fact, since the days when the pilot project for what was to become the videoconferencing of the future was called Halo. Created by HP for the Dreamworks animation studio, it combined videoconferencing and the exchange of work files requiring several hundred gigabytes of data between the studio's various sites.
Since then, its presentation has become a standard: a meeting room with an entire wall covered with flat screens (or projection screens), directional microphones placed everywhere and a control device placed on the table. The mirror effect of the room adds to the realism of this top-of-the-range solution. "A large space, several screens, project management, studies, equipment, installations... the list price is $240,000," says Gilles Chatelain, Visual Collaboration Services Business Manager at HP. At this level, any malfunction is unacceptable. The rooms therefore have a concierge responsible for putting people in touch with each other, resolving problems, answering questions, etc. Everything is based on a dedicated network. "You need a lot of regular bandwidth to forget about the technology and get on with your work", Gilles Chatelain continues. Operating costs obviously vary according to the distance of the links.
The sector is banking on the quality-simplicity tandem by focusing on training and services. The aim is to increase room occupancy rates. "Without the services aspect, we observe that the rooms are occupied around 10 % of the time. If we take this aspect into account, the figure rises to over 50 %", explains Michel Dudet. The key to this is the rapid return on investment. "It's under a year," says François Moïse. Alongside systems ranging from telephones with screens to top-of-the-range installations, videoconferencing has become an integral part of many collaborative processes. Visio on mobile phones, the spearhead of 3G in its day, may have faded into obscurity, but the embedding of video in Microsoft or IBM software suites is on the increase. And video can be available everywhere, thanks to the webcam built into laptops and with the support of wireless broadband networks (wi-fi, 3G, 3G+). The integration of these technologies into instant messaging is making them a commonplace tool for the highly collaborative Generation Y. When they arrive on the job market, their familiarity with the technology may well transform videoconferencing into a ubiquitous tool...
