BCD Travel and its consulting arm, Advito, have
collaborated with Cisco to launch a Total Collaboration Management practice.
According to BCD Advito, corporate travel programs are pushing beyond the
concept of managing physical travel by including virtual travel technologies.
BCD Advito seeks
to formalize this trend as “a holistic and strategic approach to deciding which
trips drive value and which meetings are best handled by virtual
collaboration,” according to April Bridgeman, senior vice president of BCD
Travel and managing director for Advito. That said, collaboration management is
not entirely about travel avoidance, according to collaborator Cisco. It’s an
“obvious benefit,” said Andre Smit, who leads Cisco’s worldwide collaboration
sales organization, adding that more frequent meetings where “the people
involved feel like they are actually together in the same room” builds
relationships, whether between individuals on remote teams or between the
company and its vendors and suppliers.
As part of the marketing agreement, Advito has introduced
a service set for client companies looking to deploy collaboration tools as a
formal piece of their travel programs. The practice aims to realize travel
savings by shifting spend to high-value travel opportunities, engaging
employees on how to determine when to travel or stay put, enabling travelers
with technologies that make it easy and effective to stay and measuring the
impact of virtual strategies. The agreement with Cisco follows recent BCD
market analysis that showed high penetration of collaboration technologies,
lower technology price points and the mainstreaming of consumer tools like
FaceTime, Google Hangouts and Skype.