ROI with Polycom Video Conferencing Equipment Part II

Bob Preston: Well, really, Scott, you know, any organization is interested in having a return on their investment, right? But when we talk about ROI calculation and financial metrics and these types of advanced calculations, we are really talking about large organizations, primarily enterprise type companies, but they could be healthcare facilities, they could even be higher education campuses. And in terms of who, you know, you are talking about department heads, division heads, you know, the ones that are really watching the financial results probably signing the checks, you know.

Scott Whitney: Yeah, right.

Bob Preston: You know, and in a large enterprise, certainly any CFO, why because he manages the finance and ultimately he is probably signing the checks. The CIO, he is responsible for the enterprise infrastructure and properly leveraging any network resource. And of course, the CEO, right, he is responsible to the bottom line and ultimately for a return to the shareholders.

Scott Whitney: Bob, I'm sure there is a variety of ways folks are trying to communicate more efficiently, more effectively now, right?

Bob Preston: Yes, absolutely, Scott. In any organization, if there is an effort to cut cost, one of the first places that a company will look is their travel expense. So, if people aren't going to travel to meet and collaborate, how will they do that, how will they communicate? Well, they are the old fashion ways, right? There is picking up the phone and calling somebody. A problem with that is today you get a voice mail message and their communication goes back and forth. That's really kind of inefficient. Same with email. You send an email off, you might get an answer the next day and this type of ping ponging thing can go on for several days before any kind of conclusions is met, it's not particularly efficient.

The other way is voice conferencing. Voice conferencing is very powerful. It's very efficient today with high definition voice but, you know, pretty much just for short meetings, right? If you get together, you have a common purpose, you want to talk about something specific. It's a pretty good way to communicate, but if you are talking about a larger meeting, more people on the line, maybe a longer meeting, some type of a business review, it's really, really tough to get the full essence of the content that's exchanged unless you can really see the presenters to their faces, see the material they are presenting and really have that sort of visual interaction.

Another method that's popular today is web conferencing like WebEx, Microsoft Live Meeting.

Scott Whitney: Right.

Bob Preston: Web conferencing is a great way to communicate if you are kind of doing a stand up and present type meeting, where I'm pitching information and that's mainly one way communication because you can hear me speak and you can see my slides and at the end of it, you know, everybody applauds and they like the information exchange. But for a longer meeting, where there's a collaboration going on, there is a lot of back and forth, we feel that web conferencing just doesn't really cut it.

So today, you know we are talking about in terms of ROIs is really the Polycom visual collaboration solution, video conferencing or telepresence where you can really truly see what's going with all the people in meeting. Multiple people can come into the virtual meeting room, they can see each other, they can see their facial expressions, the way they are communicating. They can exchange ideas, they can show things visually, right, and also of course, exchange content.

Scott Whitney: You know about web conferencing, it's been my experience that if you do like a WebEx thing, the problem with it is you can't tell what the audience is doing. You don't really know if they are engaged with you or not.

Bob Preston: Right. You don't even know if they are listening.

Scott Whitney: Right.