The Spread of Telepresence Technology

Besides the increasing financial expense of air travel and its human wear-and-tear, businesses' concerns about its environmental costs are also driving faster and wider adoption of videoconferencing, according to executives at Eyenetwork, a UK-based pioneer in Europe's videoconferencing market. "Obviously, many business trips are unavoidable but the trends we see are clear, and decision makers are more critical of travel in an era of rising costs and social environmental responsibility," said company director Lisa Honan.

To that can be added the longer-standing trend toward globalization and the requirements of managing dispersed workforces and supply chains, commented Akiba Saeedi, IBM Lotus' program director for unified communications and collaboration. "Some of the things have been happening for a while - globalization, cutting travel costs, green initiatives; they all dovetail pretty nicely together."

UNIFYING COMMUNICATIONS, PRODUCING LESS CO2
These trends have all contributed to the emergence of the unified communications framework that combines data, voice and video, "bringing things like IM (instant messaging), voice communications and Web videoconferencing together. Often now, when you think about Web conferencing, there's a screen-sharing component, a voice and a video component all being brought together within an integrated framework and service," Saeedi told the E-Commerce Times.

IBM will shortly be celebrating the 10th anniversary of Lotus Sametime, an organizational tool that brings together an IM application and Web conferencing capabilities with integrated audio, video and screen/data sharing capabilities through one application service and user interface.

Collaborative workflow and communication tools like Sametime are vital to businesses such as Intellicare, which provides hospitals nationwide with an on-demand service for hiring nurses and obtaining other specialist support services. In addition to using Sametime to access and manage a much larger talent pool than would otherwise be possible, management, nurses and doctors use it to communicate and share information and data remotely.

"Videoconference use is expanding in tandem with fuel and other travel costs and as more governments introduce reward and taxation incentives to reach carbon reduction objectives," according to Eyenetwork research. "Experts calculate that 1.4 billion (metric) tons of atmospheric CO2 per year (2 percent of global CO2 emissions) were caused by aircraft in 1990, with predictions of 4 billion tons by 2050, or 3 percent of total UN mid-range CO2 projections for that year."

Associated Link: Full article: The Spread of Telepresence Technology

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