With the average return flight from Heathrow to New York producing an estimated 1.54 tonnes of CO2 per person, according to carbon trading firm Climate Care, and the government recently committing to reducing corporate carbon levels by 12.5 percent from last year’s level by 2012, pressure is mounting on UK companies to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases produced by business travel.

As a result firms are increasingly turning to web conferencing technology to replace face-to-face meetings and car and air travel, which is also generating significant cost and time savings.

One company that has embraced the technology is Lex Vehicle Leasing, which runs video conferences using technology from collaborative software specialist Polycom. It calculated that last year its video conferencing saved 377,745 road miles and 11,804 gallons of petrol, which meant 115 tonnes of CO2 was not pumped into the atmosphere.

The other benefits were that staff spent an extra 7,538 hours at their desks, which they would otherwise have spent on the road, and overall the firm saved £185,118.
“As a vehicle leasing company we have a responsibility to show that where it is possible to reduce our environmental impact we do so,” said Helen Counsell, quality environment manager at Lex Vehicle Leasing. “We made a conscious decision to work to limit business journeys and we are seeing bottom line benefits as a result.”

Though the company originally planned web conferences for internal meetings only it has extended their use. “We now use it with partners in India and are rolling it out to talk to customers,” said Counsell. “We’re getting a good reaction, with a lot of customers surprised by how much the technology has moved on since they first looked at it five years ago.”

Similarly, Purple Insight, a startup vendor of data mining software, has found that its customers too are increasingly inclined to accept web conferences as a replacement for physical meetings. The firm uses WebEx web conferences throughout the early stages of the sales cycle, and staff only travel to meet customers as negotiations progress, said Rob Jenkins of Purple Insight.

People are increasingly coming round to this way of doing business, according to Jenkins, and not least because of the environmental savings. “Customers certainly wouldn’t be very impressed if I said, ‘Can we do a web conference as it saves me money?’” he admitted. “But as they now accept that this is also helping to reduce carbon emissions they are much more open to the idea.”

But though the environmental factor is giving web conferences a good name, it is the more traditional business benefits that are driving adoption, according to Ray McGroarty, director for Solutions and Product Management at Polycom. “It is the bottom line gains that drive the initial decision,” McGroarty said. “A lot of firms have realised they can save a lot of money by no longer having executives taking a two-day trip to the US for a half-day meeting when they can do it through a video conference instead.”

It is this financial argument that IT directors should use to encourage business managers to back web conferencing, according to Counsell. “The green benefits are great in terms of limiting pollution, but you have to demonstrate the bottom line gains,” she said.