Brockmann and Company | Customer Insights

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This report is based on the insights of 281 business users of video conferencing products and services from around the world. Their experience and value comparisons of HD video conferencing as a substitute for face-to-face meetings, as a substitute for audio conferences and as a substitute for web conferences are presented. The demand curve of HD video conferencing as a substitute for same day business trips, overnight trips and inter-continental trips are determined and reviewed.

A compelling case for using travel analysis is shown to provide an alternative method for justifying investment in HD video conferencing products and services.

This report was brought to you in part by the financial support of Nortel and LifeSize.

This report reviews the fundamentals of encouraging a change in business user behavior. 

Basic observations from the Energy Camp at Interop 2008 in Las Vegas showed that companies exhibit many attributes that suggest that:

• Nobody measures travel or carbon dioxide production
• Nobody accounts for business travel
• Nobody is trained to solve problems in groups

Five best practices are reviewed and recommended to amend employee behavior in large and mid-sized enterprises.

This paper is designed to equip an executive decision maker with the details they need to know to be able to make effective decisions about high de
nition (HD) video conferencing projects within the
rm.

The video conferencing environment has changed a great deal in the past
ve years:

• HD visual and audio quality is readily available costing well under $10,000 per endpoint.
• Multi-megabit per second Internet connections can be deployed in most locations around the world - even home of
  ces - in 30 days or less and cost less than $100/month.
• Sophisticated software makes initiating a video session a pleasant and trivial procedure.

New applications and new classes of users are in a position to quickly capture the bene
ts of HD video conferencing. Independent research involving hundreds of business users show that organizations that leverage the video conferencing experience also have higher business performance: higher revenues per employee, higher customer satisfaction and higher employee satisfaction. As well, video conferencing saves time and avoids the hassles of modern business travel.

Studies of Top Performers show that the success factors of adoption, accessibility and quality are the critical ingredients of successful video conferencing implementations. Adoption is about imbedding the service into the way employees do things. Accessibility refers to the convenience of participation. Quality is about allowing only the smallest of gaps between users expectations from their video conferencing experience, and the actual quality of the encounter with the technology. All three are interdependent and must be present to assure an effective and growing implementation.

Five key considerations are discussed to determine if the proposed implementation goes far enough, thinks long- term enough, is resourced within the network to assure a high quality experience, encompasses customers and suppliers and has the measurement practices in place to assure monitoring of project success and milestones.

Peter Brockmann is presenting at Interop Las Vegas on "The High Definition Video Conferencing Experience", in Mandalay Bay "L" at 3:15-4 pm, Tuesday April 29, 2008. He will be summarizing his research based on 350 business users of conferencing technologies.

The session is "Telepresence for Everyone" and includes a customer of LifeSize who will be presenting their unique application of video conferencing in their business.

For the first 47,500 years since humans began to use verbal communications, we have relied on only good ol' face-to-face meetings to conduct business. In the past 100 or so years, since the advent of modern telecommunications, that the range of real-time collaboration services has grown.

This report reviews the importance-satisfaction gap for each of the four major regions of the world and focuses on the frequency and length of face-to-face meetings by region. It also sets up more discussion around where the growth in communications services will come from. Collaboration is a zero-sum game - there are only so many meetings and conferences that you need to participate in to achieve your business goals. Some may be video conferences, others web conferences and still other face-to-face meetings, but if there's to be growth it can only come from each other, or from a general growth in the total size of the business.