The whites of their eyes

Video conferencing has been around since the 1970s. Back then, the experience was ‘clunky’, to say the least. It was hard to set up, the screens were small and the bills were large. Few used the service as a result. But new technology has changed all that. As you press a few buttons, people from all over the world take ‘seats’ around your meeting table – and all without leaving their office. It’s going to make a huge difference in all sorts of areas of business. By Aaron McCormack, CEO, BT Conferencing

Imagine you’re an HR consultant at a top-flight investment bank with offices in London, New York and Frankfurt. Among all the other things on your ‘to-do’ list today, you have to pick the best candidates for a job in a key area of the business. Between 30 and 40 of the bank’s people have applied and you don’t have the time, or the inclination, to fly to all three places to do it. Chances are that if you screen by CV or phone, you’re going to miss something. And this is a tight candidate pool. So what do you do? There must be another way.

These days, there is – and it’s one that works extremely well. I’m the CEO of BT Conferencing, and I’m based in Boston, Massachusetts. In a typical day, I might have to interview someone in Brussels for a top job, complete a performance review with one of my staff in London, check that a key customer in Dallas is happy with our service, and be with a sales team for a make-or-break meeting with banking executives based in New York.

Not long ago, it would have been impossible to have such an agenda. There are some things you can do by phone, but there are times when you need to be able to gauge people’s body language and see the whites of their eyes – the examples above among them.

Today, all I have to do is walk into what looks like an ordinary meeting room, with ordinary candidates, colleagues or customers sitting at ordinary tables. Only they are hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, depending on the city. Whatever the distance, however, their presence is so life-like you can actually make eye contact with them, get a genuine sense of their personality and, if you ask a tricky question, even see beads of sweat on their forehead.

On the same day, then, I can clearly see on screen that the candidate is nervous, my staff member is surprised by my feedback and that the customer in Dallas is palpably excited about the new ideas we’ve developed for her business. And on the sales call, I can see a look of terminal boredom on the face of one of the banking executives. He’s a broker not a technologist, so I can interrupt our technology pitch and say “You’re bored, aren’t you, Andrew? What is it you really want to know from us?”

Welcome to a new generation of video collaboration services. Thanks to their high-definition cameras and screens that are big enough to show people life size, eye contact, body language and other conversational cues come as standard – just as they would if people were sitting across the table from you.

All of this is far removed from the era when video conferencing meant having to use cramped studios equipped with small screens, often in the service provider’s offices. The limitations of yesterday’s technologies meant that, even if the people you were ‘meeting’ were relatively near at hand, the quality of the images wasn’t that good and you were constantly aware of all the ‘mechanics’ involved.

It was a real performance to get everybody connected into the call, for example. More often than not, someone technical had to do it for you. It all took time, and the need for support to be on hand added considerably to the cost. For many – me included – it seemed a high price to pay for something that was often more irritating than effectual.

Things have moved on enormously over the past 12-18 months. Companies like Cisco that make ‘telepresence’ conferencing systems are now incorporating not only the high-definition displays we are becoming familiar with in television products, but spatial audio systems that make it clear which of the people around the virtual meeting table is talking. The way everything is integrated with the meeting room’s furniture and lighting creates an authentic meeting experience. It may all be a high-technology trick, but you really do think you’re meeting people face to face.

But slick as all this technology is, you’ll need one more thing – a high performance network that’s available in all the right places. And I don’t mean the internet. To guarantee a life-like experience, you need a high-bandwidth network that offers performance guarantees – BT’s global MPLS network, for example. You won’t want the screen to freeze every time someone downloads a big file.

Only by bringing everything together can you create the quality of experience business people need and make it business as usual. For example, the telepresence meeting rooms we supplied to Media-Saturn – Europe's largest retailer of consumer electronics – last year allow people at its offices in Ingolstadt, Germany, Munich, Paris and Moscow to work together exactly as they could if they were all in the same building.

And what’s really important is that it’s all so easy to use. There’s an episode of the American TV series “24” that shows how it works []. A fictional US Vice President wants to use a telepresence conferencing system to discuss an international nuclear crisis with his fictional Russian counterpart. To start their meeting, all they do is press a button.

Such levels of usability are no longer fiction. These days, you really can go into a room, push a button and see your video conference set up right then and there, in front of your eyes. And it can be even more advanced. For example, systems can be set up so they know exactly which rooms on the network are supposed to be to talking to each other and at what time. That way everything will be ready and working when you walk in – just as it would be when you enter any other meeting room.

It sounds great, doesn’t it? But it probably also sounds expensive. True, telepresence conferencing systems are relatively expensive at the moment, but costs are steadily coming down. And remember – like most things in this world, you can’t judge the value of the service if you only look at its costs. You have to consider the benefits, and they can soon add up. Executive time doesn’t come cheap, and long distance airfares remain high. And why take the risk of having key people out of contact in airports and on planes when you don’t have to? Business moves quickly these days, and delays in making critical decisions can end up costing a great deal.

For increasing numbers of firms, then, there’s a solid business case for investments in state-of-the-art video conferencing. Indeed, the market is growing by between 20 and 40% per annum. And the feedback from those who use it is excellent – many say it’s changed the way they run their businesses and get things done, at the executive level at least.

And thanks to recent advances, the technology is no longer limited to use within a single company. BT and Cisco have worked together to allow conferences to take place securely between compatible installations owned by different customers that use BT’s network. Being able to interconnect private infrastructures in this way may sound straightforward, but technically it’s quite revolutionary.

Of course, no matter how good and pervasive the technology becomes, it will never be a complete replacement for face-to-face meetings. There comes a point when you really do need to meet and be able to shake someone by the hand. But there are a great many situations where that’s just the icing on the cake – something that’s an option, not an essential. For those, video conferencing is just as effective and can save a great deal of time.

Little wonder, then, that higher-end systems are already being used for board meetings and executive collaboration. Put simply, it pays. And with costs heading down as deployment levels rise, its use is bound to trickle down the corporate ladder, transforming the way everyone does business.

The drivers for change – why adopt video communications?

• Because more than 60% of communication is reputed to be non-verbal
• Because these systems allow for higher quality interactions at lower costs and higher intensity
• Because this is a way to support higher staff productivity
• Because you will be leveraging your company’s agile integrated IP-infrastructure
• Because this is a way to support corporate and social responsibility – BT saved 840,000 meetings and 98,000 tonnes of CO2 in one year as a result of conferencing

Why choose BT to support your telepresence service?

Most leading telepresence offerings include a monthly end-to-end managed service component, where bandwidth, quality of service (QoS) and day-to-day operations are managed by the solutions provider. BT’s service is also:

• Vendor neutral, offering unbiased expertise – A great many companies operate in this area and we think expertise is required to ensure companies pick the right services for them. We make the choices for you, allowing you to concentrate on your core areas of expertise.
• Easy to use – Our service wrap makes the service useful and accessible, making a massive difference to your satisfaction levels.
• Fully supported – We help your people to understand how to use the service and work with you to promote it and measure its success.