Aaron McCormack, CEO of BT Conferencing took the stage at Telepresence World to explain how telepresence is, "Turning the Corner on Productivity."

Effective telepresence solutions, according to McCormack, are systems that act as "human middle-ware" and are extraordinarily intuitive for end users.

An emerging trend in business today that will become commonplace over time is a globally dispersed work teams. Telepresence solutions allow distributed teams to communicate quickly and efficiently compared to previous forms of remote conferencing.


McCormack believes that the time is finally right for telepresence due to the emerging business drivers discussed above, together with decreasing network bottlenecks and better technology to take advantage of improving networks.

However, McCormack admits that technology alone won't solve business problems, mentioning this recent comment her heard from a CEO:

"Why is my video conferencing budget increasing at the same rate as my travel budget?"

McCormack blames poor implementations, a lack of quality training, and technology designed for IS departments rather than the true end users of the products for this scenario. Effective systems will do a better job of getting inside the mind of the end user. Put more succinctly, "Value is created when systems are used rather than just when they're bought."

The Green Angle

Demonstrating how telepresence solutions can have a significant impact on decreasing CO2 emissions, McCormack provided some insight into how CO2 emissions and travel costs have dramatically changed within BT:

• BT's systems have eliminated 860,000 face to face meetings, reducing 97,000 metric tons of CO2.
• Saves an average of $587 in travel costs, accommodation fees and unproductive time, totally $469 million in savings to date.
  

Will it be the green angle, ease of use, or some other business driver that leads to increase uptake of telepresence systems? Stay tuned to find out.