Business Video Impact is Far Reaching

Many of the visitors to the AT&T booth at the VoiceCon 2009 are having their first experience of a TelePresence solution in action. Tina Vestal, customer care center manager at CHEP, perhaps sums it up best with her assessment -- "it's amazing!"

Earlier this week, BAE Systems Land and Armaments, part of the third largest defense company in the world, agreed to enhance their global employee collaboration and productivity with the AT&T Telepresence Solution.

BAE Systems will use Telepresence to provide an in-person meeting experience with executive leadership and engineering teams across the U.S., and the United Kingdom. This capability will also be expanded to Sweden, South Africa and other regions in the future.

Their TelePresence applications are intended to be far reaching, across numerous parts of their organization. Live video-based meetings will help them accelerate decision-making processes and problem-solving for high-priority projects.

More Productive Meetings, Less Unproductive Travel
With the anticipated increase in productivity through engineering team collaboration, and frequent management team interactions, the BAE Systems participants will also realize direct operational cost reduction.

AT&T's fully managed service includes in-room equipment, installation, full monitoring and management of the application, network provisioning, remote help desk service and on-site equipment maintenance and repair.

"We anticipate a reduction in travel time, costs, and realize other benefits -- including improved employee safety and quality of life through this environmentally-friendly tool," said Bharat Amin, VP & CIO at BAE Systems Land & Armaments.

BAE Systems is a global company engaged in the development, delivery and support of advanced defense, security and aerospace systems in the air, on land and at sea. They employ 105,000 people, and have customers in over 100 countries worldwide.

Updates:
Also view the Day Two video commentary from demo visitors.

Videoconferencing Enables Sales For Global Consulting Firm

The business case made the argument for Kline & Company, a management consulting and research firm about to celebrate its 50th anniversary, to investigate hosted videoconferencing. A global company, it handles approximately 40 projects at any given time. Three to six people collaborate on each project, which last three months on average. About three-quarters of its projects are global.

To collaborate and share knowledge, team members confer approximately 20 times over the duration of a project. That's thousands of in-person meetings over the course of a year, between colleagues and clients who are unlikely to be in the same location. The cost -- both financially and in terms of time -- was becoming prohibitive.

Serving Client Needs
Companies benefit from management consulting firms' insight because of their aggregated experience. But that insight needs to be shared because not every consultant can join every engagement. That's why John Hadley, Kline’s director of IT, is so bullish on WebEx's hosted videoconferencing service.

He investigated other services before settling on WebEx, impressed by its platform independence; other solutions required software to be installed on their (and clients') computers, which can be problematic in these security-conscious days.

WebEx Meeting Center, launched from a Kline-branded portal and integrated with Microsoft Outlook, provided a fully integrated Web collaboration solution that offered easy set-up of meetings and a virtual meeting experience, "as if we were all sitting in one room," Hadley says.

The improvement WebEx brought to collaboration on client engagements was so clear that Kline began deploying it elsewhere within the company. Its market research group began using it for pre- and post-sales activities, hosting 30-minute WebEx seminars for each study it produces. This lets the company reach up to 50 prospects at a time and help generate sales leads for its consulting group.

Improving Sales and Collaboration
Kline also started using WebEx internally for communication. It's used for quarterly staff meetings and sales meetings, among others.

Because of its global reach, the company also uses WebEx for sales presentations. This helps when clients are geographically dispersed as well, because the team can make presentations to up to 12 people at the same time.

When the research team launched a new database capability, using WebEx for demos helped reduce the sales cycle: the company converted 100% of its prospects to sales within 30 days.

With all companies running leaner these days, it's impossible for key personnel to cover the ground they did in the past. Think about how videoconferencing can speed up not only collaboration and information sharing in your company, but also help reduce your sales cycle.