Seamless collaboration capabilities save US$97 million in travel and gain $36 million in productivity in CY 2009 alone.
Challenge
With more than 66,000 employees in over 250 locations throughout the world, how does Cisco foster collaboration internally and enable the selling teams to meet more customers while reducing travel costs for all employees? How does an engineer in Jakarta gain insight from a colleague in London or a global sales lead in Cincinnati present to a key customer in Zurich without spending time in transit?
Can a global company foster innovation, reduce time to market, and connect with more customers around the world and across each region while significantly decreasing travel expenditures? The answer, courtesy of the rapid expansion and adoption of Cisco TelePresence™, is a resounding, "Yes."
Since the first rooms were deployed in San Jose in 2006 through the most recent installations in Singapore, Bangalore, Rio de Janeiro, Basking Ridge, and other locations, the pace of internal use of Cisco® TelePresence has greatly accelerated. "Initially Cisco TelePresence usage was limited to executives, but, as the number of rooms has expanded, and people have learned how easy it is to use, usage has exploded," says Suresha Bhat, manager of IT in the Emerging Technology Strategy group. "Today, with over 715 rooms in locations around the world, every organization, including, engineering, facilities, legal, finance, marketing is utilizing Cisco TelePresence every day as a tool to collaborate with people in more places at a moment's notice. In fact, over 198,000 multi-point meetings have been scheduled to date. Two people can meet just as easily as 96 at the single push of a button through One Button to Push, all scheduled quickly and simply via, in our case, Microsoft Outlook."
The immersive nature of Cisco TelePresence can transform a one-dimensional conference call meeting into a fully immersive collaborative event, where relationships can be built, body language is read, and cultures are bridged. All without having to wait in an airport, sit in traffic, or travel by train. In fact, all of those participant benefits are delivered while achieving corporate productivity and cost reduction goals as well.
Global Adoption
Today, Cisco TelePresence has been deployed to all theatres, including AsiaPac, Emerging Markets, European Markets, Japan, and the United States, and Canada. Worldwide, the 715 rooms are utilized, on average, five hours per business day. (Contrast this internal daily usage with the one to two hours per week of utilization for standard definition video conference systems.) The breadth of the adoption of Cisco TelePresence in the diversity of countries and locations illustrates the robustness of the network and the power of the medium.
Since launch, over 528,000 meetings have been scheduled. In fact, over 32,000 meetings have been planned in the past 30 days. Although approximately one-third are for internal purposes, nearly one-fourth of all the meetings have been for customer briefings and demos, and nearly half of Cisco TelePresence collaborations have been Meetings on Us, press briefings, and supply chain discussions. Cisco TelePresence provides customers with remote access to experts and technologies so they do not have to travel to San Jose or other locations far from them; the experts literally can come to them via Cisco TelePresence.
While the total number of meetings scheduled grew by nearly 150 percent, the number of multipoint meetings (more than two locations tied together) grew nearly 600 percent. Statistically this is extraordinary growth, but more importantly, the massive acceleration of multipoint meetings illustrates how employees at all levels are changing how they employ and view Cisco TelePresence. Collaboration between three locations or more is rapidly becoming the norm; employees are engaging with their customers, peers, partners not in one-on-one meetings, but as multilocation teams, connecting, creating, and innovating together in common communities of interest.
Cisco TelePresence is a key component in the company's next-generation collaboration strategy. The goal is to provide employees with a set of innovative collaboration tools from web conferencing to instant messaging and many forms of video spanning from the desktop to Cisco TelePresence. The key to the strategy is integrated interoperability, so that a Cisco TelePresence user can work seamlessly with a video-conferencing user.
"An employee in Bangalore should be able to collaborate immersively with teammates in Munich, San Jose, and Herndon at a moment's notice," says Carl Wiese, vice president, Global Collaboration Sales. "Our goal is to provide teams with a full suite of business video options, so they can choose the one that best suits their collaboration needs at any given time."
Benefits to Cisco of Cisco TelePresence
Cisco employees have spoken passionately how Cisco TelePresence makes their work lives more productive. View their stories here1. While Cisco TelePresence is ideal for executive meetings, board discussions, and sales presentations, employees at all levels within Cisco use Cisco TelePresence daily for a broad range of meetings:
• Supply chain management discussions: for faster decision making
• Sales and product training: to present multiple experts to customers from all over the globe
• Technical troubleshooting: to bring customer and Cisco technical resources together to solve issues
• Interviewing candidates: to review a wider pool of applicants in a shorter amount of time
• Press and analyst briefings: to connect with influencers around the globe in one day from one location
• Product demonstrations: to scale scarce expertise around the globe
In addition to the intangible benefits, those that cannot be monetized, such as enhancement of relationships, time to market, and ability to read interpersonal visual cues, a number of specific business benefits can be tied to the ever-expanding internal use of Cisco TelePresence.
Sales Cycle Impact
As noted previously, approximately 37,400 meetings have been held with customers to discuss Cisco Technology via Cisco TelePresence with over 2600 deals having been directly affected by Cisco TelePresence. Based upon sample analysis, Cisco TelePresence may reduce the average Cisco deal cycle time by up to 9.7 percent or 30 days out of 310 days.
Productivity Improvements
Time spent planning trips, en route to/from airports, to/from offsite meetings, etc. is often time wasted. In 2007, Cisco realized over $14 million in productivity savings with 150 rooms deployed, mostly in the United States. This savings grew to over $48 million in CY 2008 (with only 20 more rooms) and reached at least $56 million in 2009. As people have become comfortable with Cisco TelePresence, they invite more people to participate, both inside and outside of the company.
These valuable gains have been achieved on top of the personal productivity that employees have enjoyed. Rather than sitting at an airport awaiting a flight, an employee can virtually meet with a customer, peer, vendor, or partner via Cisco TelePresence and still make it to his or her child's school to see a recital or watch a child play in a sporting event.
Support for Green Initiatives
By reducing travel to such a high degree, Cisco is well on its way to realizing a 25 percent reduction on carbon emissions over a four-year period. These reductions are derived from reductions in airplane and automobile travel as well as from home telecommuting via Cisco TelePresence for employees.
What's Next?
Cisco is fundamentally changing the way that Cisco employees communicate both in real time and asynchronously. "Our internal experience of Cisco TelePresence has enabled Cisco to adopt video as a communication and collaboration-enabling medium," says Mark Sherwood, director of Information Systems, in Emerging Technology IT. "This broad scale and accelerating adoption showcase Cisco's transformation into a video-driven company." This transformation includes the following latest business video offerings:
• Cisco TelePresence in personal offices: "Systems are being deployed in personal offices, enabling individuals to scale ad hoc calls," says Erica Schroeder, director of Marketing. "Think of Cisco TelePresence in personal offices more like a telephone. Instead of communicating solely by voice, they can now quickly and easily present themselves visually all over the optimized network."
• Applications beyond meetings: Cisco TelePresence Recording Studio is a compelling new application that transforms Cisco TelePresence into a high-definition content studio. Record a message with one button to push and then distribute it rapidly and smoothly. Cisco TelePresence Recording Studio enables the sharing of important news very quickly with ease to teams, customers, and partners.
• Deployment in multipurpose rooms: with the introduction of the Cisco TelePresence 1100 and 1300 Systems, collaboration has moved from dedicated, remediated rooms to smaller conference rooms. Smaller groups meeting in a conference room can bring in experts or key personnel from afar with ease.
• Intercompany communication: Intercompany Cisco TelePresence, as enabled by mission-critical service providers gives organizations the ability to use Cisco TelePresence to extend Cisco TelePresence meetings to Cisco TelePresence rooms of key suppliers, partners, and customers. This intercompany connectivity drives competitive advantage, faster time to market, and enhanced collaboration
• Deeper integration with other collaboration tools: Internal innovation is driving collaboration with other systems. For example, Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage extends Cisco TelePresence to Cisco WebEx™ users. It blends the ease of use and broad reach of both Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx into one collaboration solution with "One Button to Push," transparent data sharing, and Cisco TelePresence streaming into WebEx so remote viewers can view video of the active Cisco TelePresence participants.
This publication describes how Cisco has benefited from the deployment of its own products. Many factors may have contributed to the results and benefits described; Cisco does not guarantee comparable results elsewhere.
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