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With high energy prices driving up travel costs and greenhouse gas emissions a growing global concern, organizations are looking for ways to bring people together without so many commutes to the office or business trips. Cisco’s advanced collaboration solutions offer a user experience and quality of interaction that make virtual meetings a viable alternative to face-to-face meetings. Collaboration over the network combines the business benefits of lowering operating costs and fostering teamwork with the environmental benefits of reducing travel. Unified communications is the merging of voice, data, and video on a single network to make collaboration easier and more productive. Cisco offers an extensive suite of unified communications solutions for business of all types and sizes. Following are examples of Cisco collaboration solutions that help reduce environmental impacts. Virtual Hiring Helps Avoid Emissions Cisco’s University Relations department is augmenting its in-person college recruitment process with online collaboration technology. Instead of having an executive and hiring managers travel to a campus to engage in preliminary recruitment activities, our University Relations team is using Cisco WebEx web conferencing solutions to conduct virtual information sessions. The sessions start with an overview of the company given by a Cisco executive, after which the students can enter virtual rooms to learn more about individual business units and interact with hiring managers. The five pilot sessions held so far not only helped the company avoid carbon emissions, they also saved an estimated $10,000 in travel expenses. The virtual sessions also enabled the executives and managers to make more efficient use of their time and be more productive.
Making the Web a Conference RoomWith 35,000 customers and more than 2.6 million registered users, Cisco WebEx collaboration solutions enable users to hold interactive meetings, make online presentations, deliver web-based training, provide remote support, broadcast events, and set up shared online workspaces. As one example of how Cisco WebEx can make an environmental difference, companies are using the technology to establish virtualized contact centers that allow call center agents to work remotely from localized facilities or even from home, saving the cost of setting up a centralized facility and reducing or eliminating commutes. Cisco Unified MeetingPlace and MeetingPlace Express are solutions that integrate voice, video, and web conferencing to make remote meetings natural and effective. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS), with more than 700,000 employees, uses Cisco Unified MeetingPlace with integrated voice and web conferencing to replace travel to the frequent training sessions held by the agency. “We calculate that an effective virtual conferencing solution can reduce annual travel costs by $10 million,” according to James Shipman, the USPS’s advanced computing environment program manager. Reducing travel not only saves money, it also makes employees more productive, increases job satisfaction, and helps reduce the USPS’s carbon footprint. Cisco Live Conference Goes Virtual The Cisco Live conference, most recently held June 22–26, 2008, in Orlando, Florida, provides networking training, insight, and education to Cisco customers and partners. For those who couldn’t make it in person, Cisco Live Virtual offered extensive search capabilities, video of keynotes and super sessions, customer video blogs, and content recommendations to suit the personal preferences of individual users.
Just Like Being ThereCollaboration flourishes in an atmosphere of trust, which is based on the personal interactions and social dynamics that occur when people work in close proximity and meet frequently face to face. Building trust is a challenge for virtual teams that collaborate largely by phone and email because the body language and other nonverbal signals that people use to communicate in person are absent from the conversations. Cisco TelePresence is a suite of solutions that melds high-definition video and high-quality audio and data. It makes meeting participants feel as though they are in the same room together, even when they are located on different continents. This gives employees back the time they otherwise would spend traveling, and also eliminates the fuel expenditure and carbon emissions that physical travel requires. Read about what Cisco is doing to reduce our own carbon footprint: Sustainable Company Operations Connected Building Wins New Zealand Green Award Meridian Energy is New Zealand’s largest state-owned electricity generator, supplying power to 200,000 residential and business customers using only renewable resources. The company aspired to be recognized as a Global Reference Company for Renewable Energy. To achieve that goal, Meridian needed technology that would enable employees to collaborate over distance, save on travel emissions, and become more energy efficient. Meridian built New Zealand’s first fully green-certified building in Wellington, implementing Cisco’s Unified Communications technology suite. The building contains smart operating systems that sense and react to wind, sun, temperature, and internal carbon-dioxide levels, and also employs solar power to heat water and recycle rainwater for flushing toilets. The building is expected to consume approximately 60 percent less energy and 70 percent less water than a standard office building. The New Zealand Green Building Council has awarded the facility a five-star rating—the first such designation for a purpose-built building in New Zealand. |
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