Active Planet: HP’s video conferencing studio set to ground work-related air travel

HP is, of course, a world leading computing company. It is even ranked 32 worldwide in Fortune 500’s list in 2008. In ECO terms, its goal is to drop its CO2 emissions by 16% below 2005 levels by the end of 2010. For such a huge company, and one in the energy intensive IT industry, this represents a reduction of 6 millions tons of CO2.

Just 3 months ago, HP had announced it had already exceeded this tough goal. Needing new goals, it set the bar higher to 20% below 2005 levels by the end of 2013. It achieved half of this goal by reducing its air travel using a video conferencing technology called HP Halo Video Collaboration Studio.

It already had the technology from 2003 when it was commissioned by DreamWorks to provide a solution to speed up its animation production processes. The major obstacle for DreamWorks was the importance of face-to-face meetings despite running a global company. The challenge was to create a video conferencing system that simulated the real-life meeting as much as possible.

The studios have high quality sound and are equipped with high-definition conference displays to show life-size images of participants, high magnification document cameras capable of zooming in on objects on a table, for example – thus revealing fine details – and collaboration monitors that allow participants to share documents and play full-motion video directly from their notebooks. The studio design gives participants the visual feeling of being in the same room.

Following DreamWorks, Nokia and Diageo have picked up the technology. Nokia acclaims it as accounting for a 22% reduction in CO2 emissions from air travel on the previous year. Diageo have estimated a pay-back time of two years for the Halo. HP uses it themselves. Their estimated pay-back time is one year. Some other financial results include:

• Savings of USD 300,000 per year on flights for preliminary job interviews
• Savings of USD 1 million in travel costs on the transfer of a product line from US to Singapore.

Unfortunately for opportunistic staff this could spell the end for the free holiday paid by the company. Video conferencing is ready to replace the face-to-face, it is environmentally smart, and it’s a good cost saving decision too.

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Darren Willman heads the world’s first all-youth event-specific press agency, G-1 Billion

G1-Billion is covering the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit

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