Meeting customers face to face with travel reduction

[antma]

The economic downturn has affected the travel budget for most companies.  Many road warriors who used to travel on a weekly basis are now asked to find ways to optimize their time and productivity...

How is your company dealing with this dilemma?

Anthony

Cisco TelePresence Marketing Manager

[dadawes]

Internally Cisco is promoting the use of telepresence to reduce travel costs. We have high end high definition telepresence rooms at many of our offices which makes it quite convenient - we get the benefits of face to face meetings while avoiding all of the costs, inconvenience, and time away from the office flying would impose. I suspect many of the meetings are internal - Cisco employees teleconferencing with other Cisco employees - but we can also use the facilities to meet with customers.

[mpmartel0514]

Budget cuts have hit everyone very hard. We have had to curtail any and all travel and must now seek approval for any request on a case by case basis. When you are talking of early retirement buyouts and "significant layoffs", travel reductions don't seem as important anymore. Besides, if you take advantage of some of the great collaboration technologies that are out there, you can still remain in close contact without necessarily being face to face.

[netman1001]

I work for a Cisco reseller and we are seeing more demand and requests fot Webex, Telepresence, MeetingPlace, etc... than at any other time in the last several years.  We are also seeing a drastic reduction within the Cisco employee community as well.  I think that the changes are a good thing, they are helping the most experienced and professional engineers extend their knowledge beyond travel and time boundaries.

[angjo]

Because of travel reduction, we are getting more and more demands for TelePresence.  However, the big challenge with TelePresence is the bandwidth is expensive especially for International sites.  Cisco is coming out with a lower bandwidth option for TelePresence.  Just curious to find out who else is participating on the early field trial for this and what the results are - or is it even ready?

[chungewa]

SO there is a low bandwidth option of 3Mbps for TP working in 720p，though not 1080p，but you'll feel without appreciably changing from 720p

OR,you can chose WEBEX for global biz-meeting,meetingplace is another choice.

[gps03]

My group was ahead of the curve, converting just about 100% of our training classes to synchronous classes delivered via WebEx Training center about three years ago. With the down-turn in the economy I am seeing dozens more requests for synchronous meetings & classes.  Right now I am getting up to speed on the integrated VC with WebEx and WebEx mobile.