Magor Communications of Ottawa is a product of Sir Terence Matthews’ start-up success factory,
Wesley Clover. Its business: easy-to-use telepresence with a collaborative twist. Magor gave us these video insights.Organizations need telepresence/ videoconferencing when...They realize just how much money is being spent on travel between offices for internal meetings not to mention how much time is wasted sitting in airports. A management team meeting of an internationally dispersed company, where the executives traditionally met face-to-face, can cost tens of thousands of dollars when flights, hotels, car hire and food are included.
For some organizations, a few quarterly meetings can cover the cost of a telepresence solution, which can also satisfy the requirements of other functional departments within the enterprise. A six to nine month ROI certainly excites cost-conscious CFOs.
Businesses see that the experience of telepresence can be similar to talking to someone on the other side of a table or as a group. With the life-size representation of people, high definition video and audio and true eye contact, telepresence makes the meeting experience potentially pleasant. Prior to the availability of telepresence, the experience of using many traditional video conferencing solutions was diabolical and unreliable to the extent that, even today, many businesses have video conferencing systems gathering dust in the corner of a conference room.
Organizations recognize that there are solutions today that can go beyond telepresence. Some businesses find that telepresence helps create a collaborative working environment; hence the new term TeleCollaboration. During a TeleCollaboration session, participants can render their desktops (agnostic of which operating system is being used) directly onto a telepresence monitor and share and modify files and documents. Some find that it’s significantly more productive to discuss and resolve issues there and then as opposed to talking and taking actions.
