Cos. Assess Remote Conferencing

Attention given the videoconferencing and Webconferencing industries by would-be meeting attendees either unable or disinclined to travel after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks certainly has given those suppliers a boost, but it is less certain that the technologies' recent popularity will translate into widespread formal integration into corporate meeting programs.

Suppliers of both technologies for years have said that they simply need a foot in the corporate meeting door to convince buyers that travel could be avoided for several meetings. Now suppliers are saying that time has arrived, as the report that usage through the last three weeks of September and the beginning of October has increased.

If the increased usage is driven by individual attendees and internal meeting sponsors, however, it is far less likely that videoconferencing and Webconferencing will earn a permanent place inside corporate meeting programs than if the growth is spurred from the top of travel and meeting departments, insiders said, because only then will policy and procedure be developed for the large-scale migration of certain types of meetings to the Web- or videoconferencing console.

For now, though, the technologies' stocks have bucked economic trends and shot upward. Usage is up and video- and Webconferencing have higher profiles than perhaps ever before. This is a marked change from Sept. 10 and before. Meetings Today's exclusive short-term meetings survey shows only 20 percent of buyers use Webconferencing and 32 percent use videoconferencing at all. However, most of those surveys were completed before the events of Sept. 11, when the corporate meetings industry changed dramatically.

"We're going to look at videoconferencing and the Web to cut back on travel, but we would have been doing that anyway for financial reasons and not simply because of the incident," said Jan Hennessey, director of travel and meeting management at Novato, Calif.-based Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. "It does provide even more reasons and evidence to do so."

Hennessey, who employs WebEx functionality through a relationship with MCI, said her company is looking at Webconferencing for training meetings, but stressed that she will not consider the technology for several types of Fireman's Fund events.

"Incentive programs are still in place, and customer programs must happen face to face. Our top leadership has to meet," Hennessey said.

"Even before Sept. 11, we viewed videoconferencing and audioconferencing as good cost containment methods that we encouraged," said Rosemarie Moskow, New Haven, Conn.-based director of e-procurement and corporate travel for SBC Communications Inc. SBC has internal videoconferencing capabilities and promotes their usage on its intranet travel page.

"There has been increased usage, and I believe the travel industry will slide for a while," Moskow said. "But eventually, travel will come back, though maybe not to the same level it was. So though we'd like people to videoconference more in the future, I don't know that it will happen."

Perhaps not surprisingly, both videoconferencing and Webconferencing companies believe that the additional usage spurred by the terrorist attacks will translate into widespread acceptance.

"We've seen increased use since the beginning of 2001, as meeting budgets have been cut and companies have sought alternatives so they can keep meeting," said Jennifer Sigmund of Milpitas, Calif.-based videoconferencing company Polycom Inc.

"But there has been a higher awareness of videoconferencing since Sept. 11," she said.

Polycom did not have solid usage numbers at press time, but Sigmund said increased volume was clear. The company believes that September's videoconferencing newcomers will embrace the technology, enabling a clearer path to formal representation in corporate meeting programs.

"More people will try it, even people that were on the fence about videoconferencing or had bad prior experiences," Sigmund said. "We think adoption will continue to grow. It will absolutely be more of a presence in meeting programs. The majority of our growth before the 11th evolved from the companies that had already adopted videoconferencing as a meeting solution. The number of those companies will grow as well."

Polycom was expected to complete its $362 million acquisition of competitor PictureTel Corp., now that it has cleared federal antitrust scrutiny (Meetings Today, Sept. 24).

"The usage of our service increased by over 38 percent in the week from Sept. 10 to Sept. 17, specifically by existing customers," said Janice Kapner, spokeswoman for Mountain View, Calif.-based Placeware. "Many corporations are limiting travel. We believe that this disaster and the current economic climate are both catalysts for an industry that was already growing, and now it is growing at a faster rate. It is a boost."

Kapner stressed that she was speaking specifically of the growth potential of Webconferencing, not of videoconferencing.

"Online collaboration, distance learning and more effective and efficient communication, particularly via Web- conferencing, are elements that were already finding their way into business. You're saving time and money, both from not traveling. The industry was strong and growing even before the disaster. So, to us, this is a catalyst for growth for an industry in its infancy."