Interview: Global Videoconferencing Network Americas VP Of Sales Dave Martella

Brussels-based Global Videoconferencing Network, a budding booking portal for public remote conferencing rooms, recently appointed former Cisco executive Dave Martella to lead sales expansion in the Americas. At Cisco, Martella led efforts to deploy public videoconferencing rooms, including spaces at Marriott, Starwood and Taj Hotels properties. Martella spoke recently with Business Travel News senior editor Michael B. Baker about his new role, GVN's expansion plans and how it compares with other efforts to integrate remote conferencing into travel.

In a nutshell, what is GVN's function?

We are a virtual airline. We deliver the virtual communication to corporations, and we're doing it through existing travel channels. The customer who wants to use the product will be able to use their standard travel booking tools or relationships to be able to book these rooms. Instead of going to the airport and getting on an airplane, they go to the GVN Airlines airport, which happens to be a local hotel, and they take their seat in their GVN Airlines airplane, which happens to be high-def videoconferencing. Then, they have their meeting and sleep in their own bed later that night.

How does it compare with Sabre Virtual Meetings?

The primary difference is that we will have a standard installation and a very large network of locations that we will manage, and we will ensure we have the right technology and the right service. We are working with probably the same partners as Sabre to offer a solution that is ready today, that has the ability to make those rooms available.

What's your current distribution?

Right now, GVN has over 3,000 rooms, and those 3,000 rooms have been used for over 100,000 hours in the past few years. Some of those rooms are standard-definition and some are high-definition, but all the rooms GVN will be building are high-definition and telepresence.

Is GVN's reach global?

It's absolutely global. It ranges from the top cities globally into some that you would think, "Why would anybody put a room in that location?" but it happens to be because there are corporate customers. We try to make sure we have locations where our customers need them and want them, and we're constantly polling the customer to find out where they want additional locations. That also helps us in our conversations with the hotels in those locations, because we can come to them and say that we have however many requests for a location in this area or this specific hotel.

Are the bulk of bookings done through GVN, or through online booking tools and other outlets?

Right now, it's done primarily through GVN. We are the exclusive partner for WhyGo. We manage the public room inventory, and we do all of the travel-specific distribution integration. We now are changing the model to include travel agents. We currently have relationships with FCm Travel, BCD Travel, Uniglobe and, most recently, GlobalStar.

Has the strategy from the hotelier side changed? Big players like Marriott and Starwood were installing large remote conferencing rooms in hotels a few years ago.

Stepping back, we wanted to know where customers would envision using a product or service like this. We did focus groups and a lot of primary and secondary research. Potential customers told us they would find these to be most useful in places where they already attended meetings, so either in their own place of business, in hotels or in common space of a shared building—for example, you have a 60-story skyscraper in New York, they would envision this as one of the amenities that the real estate companies provides, and it's down off the lobby. That's the kind of places that customers said they would most like to use it. Hotels became the sought-after venue. What we learned as we were talking to the various hotel chains and partners—at Cisco, we had Marriott, Starwood and Taj Hotels—is that they were interested in a flexible space. One concern was the potential loss of revenue of that room if it was dedicated and they weren't doing enough videoconferencing. That's one of the things that GVN has looked at, allowing the hotel to have high-definition videoconferencing in a multi-purpose meeting room, so it can be used just as a normal [meeting room] and the high-definition videoconferencing becomes an attribute of that room. So, when you look at rooms in the property management system, just like some rooms have a projector and some have screens, this room would simply have the attribute of GVN high-definition videoconferencing.

Is interconnectivity among different networks still an issue?

It's become much less of an issue. In the early days, four and a half or five years ago, interconnectivity—the connection from one network to another network—was actually nonexistent. If you had an AT&T customer using this technology and a customer with BT, those two customers couldn't talk to each other. That has been solved, and most of the large providers and many of the smaller providers now have interconnectivity agreements with the other carriers. The other issue used to be interoperability, which is different technology and different companies having different standards. Industry standards have come around so that interoperability is rarely an issue any longer.

Do you still see any reluctance from the travel side to embrace this?

Smart companies want to provide the services that customers want, as opposed to what they think the customer wants or should use because it's better for them. There's both an offensive and defensive play, offensive meaning it's a business line and they can earn revenues that they weren't capturing before, and defensive because if some small percentage of traditional travel is going to go to virtual travel, they'll have a way to monetize that so that [they're] not losing business to somebody else.

At corporations, remote conferencing often is a function of IT. Do you see it being integrated more into the travel side?

Internal installations start out to be IT because it's purely an IT solution. In larger companies, it rapidly becomes a part of travel, and travel is often a part of the finance organization. This is similar to the way an online booking tool is installed by IT, but usage is driven by travel managers. At Cisco, [the travel department] made sure that anybody scheduling travel was reminded of the other opportunities to make sure people didn't automatically say, "I have to jump on an airplane and stay at the hotel." Certainly, GVN isn't saying that travel should go away by any stretch of the imagination. There is always going to be business travel and leisure travel, but this is an option for ways to meet with customers and partners. We found that oftentimes you'd like to meet with your customer more regularly. You would never do transcontinental flights every two weeks, but doing videoconferencing with them every two weeks or three weeks becomes very attractive.