By Jay Alvi Executive Vice-President Enterprise Se Thursday, January 26 2012

According to the David Suzuki Foundation, air travel accounts for four to nine percent of the total climate change impact of human activity. With business travel, unproductive hours are racked up sitting in airports waiting for connecting flights, processing of detailed security checks and long flights just for a meeting that lasts about three hours

The unproductive time coupled with airfare, accommodations and other travel related expenses make many organisations think twice before sanctioning business travel and unfortunately many beneficial opportunities are foregone.

Technology has risen to the challenge of this business dilemma by making it possible for organisations to involve employees in real-time immersive business or training engagements with overseas clients, without the expense of travel abroad.

Recently, the media in New Delhi and Trinidad was afforded the opportunity to interact with Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar from her Mumbai location.

From the Blink telepresence room in Port-of-Spain, those in attendance were afforded the opportunity to meet with the PM in a way they had never done before while she was abroad.

Telepresence infrastructure is far superior to any other form of real time audio visual interactive communications.

It features 20 megabits of dedicated bandwidth, wall to wall high definition video, high quality sound, full computer integration and 24/7 operations with connections to similar facilities in over 30 countries.

Meeting rooms mirror each other in furnishing and background making it possible for those on the different continents of the world to have an enhanced face to face experience as though all are in the same room - this is indicative of how serious TSTT is about supporting local commerce.

Engaging overseas vendors and service providers is a critical part of business for many companies. During an economic slowdown doing so can be much more challenging.

Consider the advantage of up to 18 employees being in a meeting or training session at the Blink Telepresence Room versus the time and cost of sending these employees abroad.

An online survey by Cisco Systems Inc of 239 technical and business decision makers in medium to large organisations found that businesses using telepresence were transformed. Travel costs were reduced, employee time was optimised and critical problems were resolved in faster times.

Telepresence should not be confused with video conferencing. Telepresence is more interactive. Slow moving video and pixelation, due to a limited bandwidth, are just a few of the frustrating issues business owners have encountered with some standard video conferencing products during important meetings.

Recently, TSTT used telepresence for the training of IT staff by Cisco experts. It was difficult to get the vendors to come to TT at the time we wanted them to come.

Yet, within minutes we were able to set up a meeting with a top Cisco expert in San Jose, California. Without telepresence we would have waited many months to secure that meeting.

Currently TT is the only country in the Caribbean to have public telepresence rooms. In Trinidad, they are located at TSTT House, Edward Street, Port-of-Spain, TSTT’s Office at St James Street, San Fernando and coming soon to Tobago. The rooms seat 18 and are opened twenty four hours, seven days a week and booked on an hourly or daily basis.

Eventually the company wants to enter into an arrangement with LIME out of Barbados and Jamaica to introduce telepresence services there.

A lot of companies in TT stand to benefit from that arrangement including local banks and conglomerates like Neal and Massy and Ansa McAl. We hope that by the end of the calendar year, Barbados and Jamaica would catch up with us.