It's good to video talk

Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust uses a medical conferencing system as a replacement for surgery meetings

The impetus for firms to rein in spending and reduce their carbon footprint has turned the business world’s attention to corporate travel. Potentially, videoconferencing can offer an alternative, allowing people to experience the benefits of face-to-face communication without the hassle and cost of moving location.

Certainly, recent improvements in high-definition video and audio technology, coupled with faster and more reliable broadband and wide area network links connecting homes and offices, have made the technology more viable and acceptable for users.

But the range of available videoconferencing technologies is huge, and the choice of technology –­ and the infrastructure needed to support it ­ varies – depending on whether companies are looking to cram the entire executive board onto a single screen, broadcast live event footage, conduct e-learning sessions or make a simple two-way video call to a colleague in another city.

The benefits
It is indisputable that the cost arguments for looking at alternatives to corporate travel are beginning to stack up.

A report published by researcher Aberdeen Group in early 2009 stated that companies with more than $1bn (£694m) in annual revenue averaged $22.9m in travel and entertainment spending. Among the respondents, 65 per cent cited travel costs as an important bottom-line consideration.

Aberdeen Group also found that virtual meetings are used by a variety of remote working teams, including software engineers and those employed in contact centre roles, and suggested that telepresence and videoconferencing can perform roles above and beyond executive conferencing and departmental conference meetings.

The options
Telepresence is a relatively new technology, with the first systems launched in 2006 by HP and Cisco. It represents the high end of videoconferencing, with specially designed rooms using high-definition video to provide an immersive and life-like experience. To date, the costs have led to limited uptake.

In March 2008, Gartner estimated market penetration of HD videoconferencing systems at less than five per cent.

Nevertheless, the analyst also forecast that the annual growth of the worldwide videoconferencing market will be 20 to 30 per cent through to 2010. And it believes that much of the investment will go towards high-definition systems, as prices begin to tumble.

Traditional videoconferencing packages cost less, and while not delivering anything close to an immersive experience, they remain a vital communications and collaboration tool for all sorts of organisations.

In action
HSBC recently installed telepresence kit from Cisco in its offices in London, Chicago, New York, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur.

The bank also uses Tandberg videoconferencing systems and WebEx webconferencing services for one-to-one meetings and for improving meeting productivity compared to dial-in teleconferences, where participant engagement can be low.

“Video and audio quality is superb ­ – very life-like ­ – and it is now genuinely replacing travel,” says Matthew O’Neill, group head of communication systems and support at HSBC’s technology and services division.

Previously, some HSBC executives could spend up to a week travelling between three different continents, placing additional burdens on hard-working staff and involving wasted hours spent in airports and suffering from jet lag.

“Savings are predominantly in travel costs, but also in reduced executive downtime and uninterrupted productivity,” says O’Neill.

Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London recently installed a medical conferencing system in partnership with specialist supplier MultiSense Communications, to provide specialist training to other surgeons based both onsite and offsite.

The mobile unit is housed on a cart that can be wheeled easily from one location to another, and provides keyhole surgery footage to audiences, usually situated within different rooms in the same hospital or nearby hotels.

The system uses Polycom’s EagleEye high-definition cameras and Codex microphones, coupled with a video source to display live keyhole surgery, all of which feeds into the local area network (LAN) socket on the wall.

The videoconferencing facility is also used as a replacement for surgery meetings previously held in London and Norwich, which were handled using ISDN, microwave or satellite links provided by external contractors.

“Instead of having to pay the full £12,000 outsourcing fee for audio visual equipment, which often required satellite trucks at their end, we can get a £3,000 to £4,000 donation into our fund to pay the capital equipment costs, so I think it will be self-sufficient within a couple of meetings,” says Dr Declan Murphy, a consultant urologist at the trust.

Long-distance learning was also a driving factor in the installation of videoconferencing facilities at 40 schools for the children of British Forces personnel serving overseas last year, at locations in Germany, Cyprus, Belize, Brunei and the Falkland Islands.

The Ministry of Defence spent about £350,000 on a Tandberg videoconferencing and collaboration system, implemented by systems integrator Impact Marcom. Each system consists of a mini-server and high-definition camera configured for both ISDN and IP connections, a 40in LCD TV, presentation cabinet, microphone and videoconferencing software.

“The kit is first class. I even used it to do a job interview with somebody in the Falklands and it worked fine,” says Steve Wallace, facilities and ICT manager at Service Children’s Education (SCE) Schools.

The systems help SCE by providing teaching and learning tools, enabling them to deliver remote lessons to pupils. It was set up under the government’s primary strategy learning network initiative, and is also used to encourage school administration and support staff to talk to each other and share ideas.

“We looked at Skype, Adobe Connect Professional and some software that Oracle was developing for us, but while they were fine for one-to-one sessions, we wanted something bigger that could deliver a lesson to a whole classroom, and we simply could not do that with other technology available to us at the time,” says Wallace.

Further considerations
The price of videoconferencing hardware and software is just one part of the overall costs ­ – existing infrastructure dictates how much more organisations may need to spend. With so much high-definition video and audio suddenly introduced to their networks, many organisations find they need to upgrade their LANs to cope with the increased data traffic.

HSBC had to review its network infrastructure to accommodate the additional traffic associated with its telephone presence system, says O’Neill.

“Collaboration between the videoconferencing and network teams is essential,” he says.
SCE knew that many of the schools’ LANs were already creaking under the strain of existing internet and email traffic, so Wallace had to change the network switch configurations to eliminate bottlenecks and reduce packet loss.

“We had a lot of old Cisco 100Mbit/s switches and had to upgrade to 1Gbit/s HP ProCurve managed switches that we could configure and access remotely,” says Wallace. “We have dedicated 2Mbit/s wide area connections, both upstream and downstream, and these were fine.”

Videoconferencing choices

Telepresence
Telepresence systems are characterised by high-definition video, offering life-size displays and camera placement to stimulate eye contact coupled with high-quality, spatial audio effects and high network bandwidth allocations to avoid pauses in the video feed. Telepresence kit is usually designed to occupy a room dedicated solely to conferencing that features appropriate sound dampening and microphone placements, neutral backdrops or visual environments designed to match a classroom.

Videoconferencing
Complete packages usually come with everything a business needs to set up videoconferencing for one-to-one or one-to-many communications sessions, including cameras, microphones, servers, network equipment and software. Standard all-in-one solutions are widely available from companies such as Tandberg, Polycom and Sony, and through specialist system integrators or directly from the vendors themselves.

Webconferencing
At the lower end of the price scale are webconferencing services such as WebEx (acquired by Cisco in 2007), GoToMeeting and Zoho, which usually download a software client to the user’s internet-connected desktop PC (which has a suitable web camera attached) before a session begins. They tend to offer online videoconferencing for multiple participants tied to instant messaging and collaboration tools which often include shared personal information management applications, whiteboarding, and presentation/ application display.

Video calling
Skype is a good example of peer-to-peer video-calling software currently available for consumers and small businesses, offering basic person-to-person calling to subscribers with their own hardware, coupled with simple in-call instant messaging and file transfer facilities. Skype-to-Skype video calls are free, quick to set up and offer adequate performance in low resolutions.