According to a Cisco press release in April, “Cisco has so far deployed more than 200 Cisco TelePresence rooms in more than 29 countries and 95 cities worldwide. With usage averaging five hours per day per room, compared to traditional video conferencing, which is typically used less than 30 minutes per day per endpoint, Cisco estimates it has saved more than $60 million in productivity improvements.”

Cisco also announced the Cisco TelePresence 500 system which is a smaller footprint version of the original, designed for a small office. As opposed to the sticker price of $340K for the TelePresence 3200, the 500 is $33,900. At $33.9K I still can't afford one for my house (rats), but this is well within the range of many branch offices and the SMB market.

Although I don’t have sales figures for HP's Halo, another marker for the value of video is that HP is set to quadruple the number of internal studios that it has deployed because demand is so high. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I’ll get to experience Halo in person, and will report back on my experiences and what they have to say about customer demand.

Not wanting to be a mere reporter here, I’d like to pass along some details on the value of video from a research study that Blair Pleasant and I are putting the finishing touches on, to be published on this site and the UC-Strategies.com site. The study is an end user benefits study on unified communications. In the study we talked to end users about their experiences with UC and the types of benefits they are receiving. It was an enlightening experience, helping us confirm that what vendors were telling us about UC wasn’t all hype.

I won’t give away the whole benefits story here, but I thought that a glimpse at what users had to say about video would be interesting. Not a lot of companies that we spoke to had deployed video yet, but for those that had implemented it, most of them saw significant productivity benefits. Some of the comments on video from the study are:

• “The video was most surprising. It is better quality than I expected, easier to use, and really makes a difference in relationships.”
• “Not only can remote people interact with people in the main office, we all get to see them. People joke around more and build relationships faster with remote people thanks to video conferencing. Also, all of our company meetings are recorded now so people who missed can go back and watch the meeting. (And fast forward through the dull parts!)”
• “Video has made remote people seem more a part of the team and I feel closer to them.”
• “Videoconferencing lets us reduce the amount of time spent on planes, and we can accomplish some of the same benefits by doing videoconferencing and save a tremendous amount of money.”
• “For me the video component will be massive. Often times, especially if I’m talking with my staff, the face-to-face communications is so important to building manager-employee relationships. IMs and emails can get misconstrued, as can voice messages. Visual communication is 60% of the message. For building trust and camaraderie with my team, video will be key.”
• With UC, it’s allowed my team to make decisions faster. They’ve been able to collaborate better. For example, we hired someone this year and we had him interview with other members of the company via videoconferencing. We never did this before. That saved about a month in terms of the interview cycle – we had three candidates go through the final selection using videoconferencing.

On the other hand, many users commented that whereas the planned video conferencing offered up benefits such as those commented on above, on an individual level users hadn’t taken to having a camera on their desk for ad hoc video conferences as much. Not surprisingly, their reasons were personal - they wouldn’t be able to multi-task during meetings if people could see them, or they work from home and don’t want to get dressed up. I can relate.

Stay tuned for the rest of the study.