Jill Smart, an Accenture executive, was skeptical the first time she stepped into the consulting firm’s new videoconferencing room in Chicago for a meeting with a group of colleagues in London. But the videoconferencing technology, known as telepresence, delivered an experience so lifelike, Smart recalled, that “10 minutes into it you forget you are not in the room with them.”
The technology consulting firm has installed 13 of the high-end videoconferencing rooms at its offices around the world and plans to have another 22 operating before the end of the year. In May alone, Accenture figures its consultants used virtual meetings to avoid 240 international trips and 120 domestic flights, for annualized savings of millions of dollars and countless hours of wearying travel for its workers.
As travel costs rise and airlines cut back service, companies large and small, are rethinking the face-to-face meeting — and business travel as well. At the same time, the technology has matured to the stage where it is often practical, affordable and more productive to move bits instead of bodies.
The emerging trend, analysts say, goes well beyond a reaction to rising travel costs and a weakening economy this year.
“These technology tools are going to change the way corporations think about travel and work in the long run,” said Claire Schooley, an analyst at Forrester Research.
No single technological breakthrough explains the progress, but rather a series of step-by-step advances — and steady investment — in telecommunications networks, software and computer processing.
The results can be seen not only in the expensive new telepresence systems like those from Cisco Systems or Hewlett-Packard, but also in a host of more mainstream collaboration technologies — Web conferencing, online document sharing, wikis, group instant messaging and Internet telephony. The audio and desktop presentations in Web-based meetings, for example, are now more…