Page 28 - st1_flip

Oil companies are not the only businesses doing well out of rising energy prices.Web conferencing suppliers are also benefting from the high cost of petrol, as businesses consider more economic alternatives to business travel.

According toWainhouse Research, the UK web conferencing market grew by 29% in 2007 and is likely to increase at a similar rate for the next four years, rising from $70.4 million to $154.0 million by 2012.

The surge in the use of web conferencing was already happening before this year’s massive rise in oil prices, and talk of oil at $200 per barrel will have done nothing to dent businesses’ enthusiasm for the technology.

In particular it strengthens the already compelling fnancial case for web-based meetings.

The National College for School Leadership (NCSL) uses online meetings from market leader WebEx to deliver information and training to school leaders across England and to cut down

on business travel by staff.

It conducted a cost analysis of 378 meetings held between April and June 2008 and worked out that it had saved £54,000 in travel expenses; 408 days in travelling time; and 57 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

Economic factors may be the primary motivation for adopting web conferencing, but it also provides businesses with a quick and easy way to reduce their carbon footprint, whether

it is used for one-to-one meetings or webinars.

Clearly the larger the audience, the greater the environmental benefts of choosing to communicate online, as research from web TV specialist BroadView demonstrates.

It commissioned carbon management specialist co2balance to compare the carbon footprint of a webcast with an international pharmaceutical conference in New Orleans involving international air travel and an overnight stay. They found that a physical event would produce 3.7 tonnes more CO2 per delegate than an online webcast, even when taking into account the energy used by the production crew, webcasting servers and PCs for viewing the event. Above all, web conferencing is a critical productivity tool for the growing number of people who spend part of their week working outside the offce either from home or from another remote location.

Citrix Online refers to such workers as webcommuters, contrasting their use of web-based conferencing and collaboration tools to the use of the telephone by the telecommuters of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

It is looking more and more likely that the high price of oil, if not climate change itself, will make webcommuters of us all.

28 sustainabletimes 0870 903 9500

Distance no object

Why we are all webcommuters now.

WebEx MeetingCentre costs £42 per month for each named host license. Hosts can hold meetings with up to 15 people per meeting. No software is required: all you need is a web browser and telephone.

Natalie Butler, UK Manager for WebEx, spoke to Sustainable Times about WebEx’s plans for the future.

The market leader in web conferencing is WebEx. It has a 60% share of the software as a service (SaaS) web conferencing market in the UK, and in response to rising oil prices saw demand

for its services increase by 20% in May and June. Natalie Butler, UK Manager for WebEx, told Sustainable Times that a number of factors were forcing businesses to change the way they do business, helping to drive demand for WebEx’s services. “The high price of oil is a catalyst. People are having to cut back on travel but they still

View from the top

want to increase productivity. In the current economic climate businesses may also have headcount issues, but even if they make redundancies, they won’t accept any loss of productivity. So they need to fnd a way to do things better.” She believes that WebEx is the solution.

“It is not just about doing meetings but changing the way you do business,” she said. “We started in the ‘90s in web conferencing with MeetingCentre. This is still our bread and butter, general tool for holding internal and external meetings, product launches and meetings with suppliers. But we decided that one size doesn’t ft all so we created different centres for different types of business.”

These include the Training centre for e-learning; the Event Centre for one-way meetings, e.g. press conferences;

the Support Centre with remote access to a PC; and the Sales Centre, which can be used to interact with clients via a portal where you can share documents.

WebEx also offers a number of bolt-on services under theWebOffce umbrella. In January it is re-launching these as WebEx Connect, which will give users a presence-enabled dashboard through which they can conduct their daily business, with access to web conferencing, instant messaging, a document sharing portal and other applications.

“We see the market growth in web conferencing as a huge opportunity, but that’s not whereWebex stops,” explained Butler. “Connect takes it from the conferencing piece into true collaboration.”

www.webex.co.uk