Submission + - Can Companies Really Afford Telepresence? (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: "Telepresence has been championed as a sustainable-minded practice that can cut down significantly on travel expenditures, but for many organizations the technology simply remains out of reach. High monthly costs, management, and room setup continue to deter companies from deploying telepresence, which if rolled out in earnest stands to cut down significantly on the overall carbon footprint of business. 'The initial setup costs of a telepresence system in two locations equals about 350 one-night trips per room over the lifetime of the telepresence rooms, and the monthly fees equal about 20 one-night trips per month,' InfoWorld reports. Put in other terms, a telepresence system must be used 25 percent of the business day to justify its investment, analysts contend. But interoperability may be the chief hurdle to realizing the environmental upsides of telepresence, as major vendors' appear to be moving slow to standardize their systems to be interoperable with one another, and with the kind of commodity components that will make telepresence affordable on a wide scale."
