At a recent telepresence roundtable, David Stirling, telepresence business director at Polycom, said the technology is growing.

According to Enterprise Communications, he said that telepresence technology has surpassed “what people in the industry and our customers may refer to as a traditional videoconferencing because it now delivers a real alternative to those face to face meetings that we have to have in business.”

Many people felt restricted by video conferencing Mr Stirling explained, because there were concerns about how customers would perceive it. “The perception now with telepresence is that it does deliver that solution,” he said.

Mr Stirling added that telepresence “actually creates an environment where you can communicate both verbally and non-verbally across the table and across the room and actually have a productive business meeting.”

He suggests that another reason the technology is becoming increasingly popular, aside from the quality of communication that telepresence facilitates, is because it offers an efficient return on investment. In fact, he said that when looking at figures, telepresence offers a greater ROI than video conferencing.

However, Mr Stirling suggests that the technology is still a couple of years away from fully maturing. He believes the B2B arena has the most to gain from telepresence and as a result the sector will drive demand.

Citing a report by Ovum, the investigation revealed that in two years forecasters claim the number of telepresence studios in use will grow to 5,000. This prediction is supported by the growing number of companies who are adopting the technology, with massive organisations such as HSBC and the Ministry of Defence piloting the facilities.

The investigation pointed out that some businesses are hesitant about investing in telepresence studios because of the investment needed. However, those companies that require a lot of travel between locations and time zones are the ones that will see the biggest benefit, as it will help drive down costs.

Furthermore, it will help any business that has pledged to reduce its environmental impact by helping them to reduce carbon emissions from travel.

The investigation also found that board-room style telepresence studios have the biggest high definition screens, as part of purpose-built suites that replicate the look and feel of a live meeting, combined with specialist surround sound impressing everyone taking part.

“With telepresence, you can be in Rome in the morning and Sao Paolo in the afternoon, and still be home for dinner,” said Laurie Heltsley, director of strategic initiatives as Procter & Gamble. “That’s priceless.”

Speaking to Air & Business Travel News, Matthew Griffin of the DWP said that a revised rail travel policy and increased use of video conferencing solutions to long-distance travel would be crucial to the department’s savings. Using a total of six telepresence studios, the DWP aims to achieve a 50% reduction in air travel and a significant reduction in conference spend.

According to Griffin, greater use of video conferencing facilities has helped the DWP reduce conference spend by 70% on last year; the single most significant saving achieved by the department.

“Our policy asks [travellers] to not travel first, before providing a list of options, of which one is video conferencing,” said Mr Griffin. “I have changed the way we book video conferencing to make it easier, and it’s all online.”

In addition to the six “very impressive” telepresence suites, the DWP has some 350 video conference units across its holdings.

Beyond the use of video conferences and telepresence to cut down on travel, significant savings have been achieved thanks to the DWP’s new rail travel policy. With compliance rates of 98% already achieved, Mr Griffin says that a stricter approach to first class travel has resulted in a reduction of average rail fares paid by the DWP from £55 in Q3 2009 to £35 this quarter.

Reports suggest that this brief grounding of flights led to an estimated saving of some 2.8m tonnes of CO2.  When this figure is coupled with estimates from the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) that business travel accounts for 20% of global air travel emissions, many businesses do not see the Icelandic volcano as a brief departure from the norm. Instead, many companies are embracing telepresence and other video conference solutions to remove their dependency on flight – and by extension, reduce their carbon footprints.

This week Enterprise Communications looked at three major firms and how they have taken steps to embrace telepresence and prepare for the future.

Among them is Tommy Hilfiger, the well-known international designer apparel brand. Hilfiger has signed a five year managed services contract which sees them provided with a variety of video conferencing solutions. Not just through the traditional use of ‘in person’ communication via telepresence, but also through specialised “virtual fitting rooms” in the brand’s prestige facilities in Amsterdam, New York and Hong Kong.

Another is Kelkoo, one of Europe’s leading shopping comparison websites. In conjunction with Tandberg VC systems, the company says it has significantly reduced business travel between its 10 international offices.

“Of course our executives still have a need for business travel, but our CEO has cut down unnecessary time out of the office by a third which is extremely valuable,” says Phillipa Hollister, PA to the CEO at Kelkoo. “Our international director too can now meet everyone he needs to face-to-face in a single day – and he does so every week.”

Finally, Enterprise Communications spoke to North American travel company Omega World Travel. The firm are provided with video conferencing services to more than 200 of their office locations around the world through the use of one unified communications platform.

“A strong communications platform is a necessity for our business, as we must have the constant ability to quickly connect with employees and customers around the world to ensure their real-time travel needs are always met,” said Gloria Bohan, President and CEO of Omega.

This was the conclusion of a panel of industry experts at the Enterprise Communications Europe event in London this month. Enterprise Communications reports that Marc Trachtenberg, co-founder of Teliris, said that telepresence uses “so many factors” beyond video and audio that it eliminates the technological barrier of traditional video conferencing systems. He believes that this “transparency” of use is “probably the key factor as to why it improves the experience over traditional video conferencing.”

Mr Trachtenberg’s opinion was shared by Howard Lichtman, president of Human Productivity Lab. He says that early video conference systems were unable to meet subconscious expectations from the user – that their counterparts would be “life size”, have “fluid” emotion or even accurate flesh tones.

“I expect when you talk that the sound is going to come you,” he said, “And I think that’s what traditional video conferencing didn’t deliver….when you do meet those expectations….people will use it.”

Others stressed that beyond its intuitiveness, the ease of use offered by modern ‘plug and play’ telepresence set-ups is of equal importance to clients. Dave Thomson, Cisco systems European Marketing Manager for Unified Communications & Collaboration, says that now users can “just press a button, it starts the meeting and they’re not thinking about the technology.”

As reported by Investor’s Business Daily’s J. Bonasia, Cisco already plays a fundamental role in the provision of telepresence, video conferences, streaming video clips and other areas of online video. Aside from supplying a variety of video capture and display equipment – such as the company’s brand name telepresence studios – Cisco supplies much of the infrastructure needed for video conference services; network equipment such as switches, routers, servers and bridges.

However the company foresees a much bigger future. Martin De Beer, senior VP of the company’s emerging technology group, says that though video makes up half of all internet traffic today Cisco expects this to jump to a staggering 90% by 2013.

“Traffic is moving from information to rich media and that calls for a fundamental change in technology,” says De Beer.

According to Investors, Cisco has invested billions in researching new video products and in purchases of video-related firms. The company is not only driving standards for picture quality and transmission, but also for interoperability and flexible configuration, such as with the newly introduced Medianet architecture which allows easier integration of plug-and-play video devices.

Guido Jouret, chief technology officer for the emerging technology group, says that many of their business video conferencing customers are using the new platform to extend internal events to outside partners or customers – providing live interaction via video or a thorough record of keynote speeches and workshops retrievable from any location.

“Two years ago, our customers would ask, ‘why video?’ ” says Jouret. “Now they’re asking, ‘how video?’ “

As reported by Computer Weekly, the use of video conferencing services and other types of video collaboration by UK employees grew by 72% in the past year. Similarly a total of 74% of businesses and enterprises surveyed said that their use of web conferencing tools had grown in comparison to last year.

These findings fulfil some of the predictions made by Forrester for the top technology trends to watch out for over the next three years. Published in PC World Business centre last week, these predictions included widespread use of telepresence and the development of people-centric collaboration platforms.

This move towards virtual communication methods can be partially accounted for by another finding from the report; although most enterprise and SME businesses believe face to face meetings are effective at relationship building, just under half (43%) said they were often inconvenient.

“The survey identifies that there is a real opportunity for virtual collaboration technologies to replace the best aspects of physical meetings, at the same avoiding many of the inefficiencies and frustrations of face-to-face meetings,” say the authors at Forrester Research.

“In response, the best of today’s collaboration tools – incorporating high definition video conferencing for example – can provide the quality of interaction required to help build confidence and trust…making better use of employees’ time and the corporate budget.”

Conducted by Ipsos Mori across 12 countries, the poll of an international sample of workers has found that video conferencing offers benefits such as building trust and improving group collaboration, as well as saving valuable working time. Among those who said they frequently used video conference meetings, 90% said it saved them at least two hours of work time a week – and one-third of these respondents estimated they saved close to a full working day.

“Lost productivity costs businesses billions each year,” said Odd Johnny Winge, formerly of Tandberg and now vice president and general manger of Cisco’s Telepresence Systems business unit.

“We frequently hear from our customers how much they value the more qualitative benefits of Cisco Telepresence and this study validates those benefits are just as powerful as the often-discussed travel and cost-reduction benefits.”

One key finding of the research was that in general, both users (76%) and non-users (60%) of video collaboration technology believe that it offers some value to businesses. However existing frequent users were, perhaps inevitably, more convinced of these than non-users.

For example, 73% of frequent users said they believed it helped keep their business competitive in the market, as opposed to 42% of non-users. Similarly 71% of users said it helped bring people closer together in comparison with just 40% of non-users, with a similar difference in opinion regarding how the technology can improve the work-life balance of employees (70% vs 37%).

Both groups of respondents were agreed though on certain benefits. 68% of all respondents said that video collaboration would improve communication when employees are working from home and 67% said it would both improve group collaboration and reduce confusion when work is distributed over several different locations.

Despite the focus on other benefits, the research also touched upon how the environmental benefits of video conferencing and collaboration technology are perceived.

Across all respondents, 68% said they perceived the technology as having some benefit to the environment, whether as an aspect of the company’s overall environmental policy or through the direct reduction of needless travel. In all 12 markets surveyed by Ipsos Mori, at least 50% of workers agreed with this statement.

Whilst more exotic applications such as telemedicine or the recent trend for telesentencing – where defendants appear in court via video conference – are significantly different from their use in business, other groups have seen strong returns using it in a more conventional manner.

One such example is the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, responsible for wildlife preservation across 83,642 square miles of mountainous territory.

According to a report in ComputerWorld, for the past three years the department has used video conferencing facilities across seven dispersed locations to save biologists and wildlife officials the need to make car journeys that can be as long as eight hours for routine meetings.

“I’ve not heard people say the system is indispensable,” says Craig Potchter, CIO for the department. “But people do say ‘hey its really cool’ and ‘thanks for putting it in  – it saves me two days of travel’.”

The department’s video conferencing facilities consist of seven studios equipped with room-sized HD video displays, as well as about 10 smaller desktop systems. According to Potchter, some 50 different sessions take place on the system in any given month.

“It isn’t always productive to bring people in from around the state for a one or two hour meeting,” says Potchter, “Video conferencing is very beneficial where sharing of data and videos are needed. Standard audio calls just don’t work very well for that purpose.”

Responses gathered from business travel managers through survey and focus group research for the Changing The Game: The Impact of New Technologies on Business Travel report indicate that technology-based communication methods are increasingly the norm for internal business meetings. In particular, 90% of respondents said that in their experience, video conferencing, telepresence and other digital communication and collaboration methods were becoming standard practice in Western Europe and North America.

“Companies are focused on achieving peak employee productivity by using technology to reduce costs as new options to support a managed travel program, but also to connect people on the road more effectively,” said Christina Degnan Manning of American Express Business Travel in a release through Business Wire.

“Advancements in video technologies, mobile devices and social media solutions are enhancing collaboration and relationship building through more seamless communication.”

According to the survey’s findings, more than half (59%) of business travellers have been offered the choice of using video conferencing services to attend internal meetings. Furthermore 52% of business travellers believe that a video conference will generate the same or greater ROI than a meeting conducted face-to-face.

The research also found that for 63% of business travel buyers, video conferencing solutions have been adopted over the past three years because of the cost reductions.