Trim down the cost of business travel. Lessen the time needed for distant meetings. Conserve wear and tear on your body. Eliminate jet lag. Circumvent exposure to SARS and other perilous diseases. Reduce exposure to terrorist activities. Increase your staff’s productive attributes and abilities to grow your business. Save money. Enable yourself to make more meetings in a given time period than you thought possible. Negotiate more effectively and faster than your competitors.

How can you take advantage of so many positive attributes for your company or organization? You may wish to evaluate and incorporate videoconferencing techniques as a viable business procedure that could help you achieve more for less.

Videoconferencing is currently taking on increasing significance in business meetings, especially when attendees must travel long distances and across international borders.

Problems that existed with the technology in the past are rapidly being overcome. Both software and equipment gains make videoconferencing a viable business tool that enable even small and medium-sized companies to realize a positive return on investment from the technology.

While videoconferencing technology has been available for many years, it was often expensive, technically challenging and often unreliable. This host of frustrating problems gave videoconferencing a less than bright image.

Today, however, major changes in videoconferencing technology have made it cheaper, easier, more reliable and more secure.

Anyone who remembers using email in 1993 will recall how difficult it was under the old DOS computer operating system. When we asked the president of the company I worked for at that time to allow us to install email in the company, he flatly rejected the idea.

Many of the early email problems experienced 10 years ago are similar to the types of problems that companies previously encountered with videoconferencing. Within the past two or three years, however, there have been tremendous strides in improving videoconferencing. As the technology continues to improve and the costs continue to come down, analysts predict that videoconferencing will become just as commonplace as email.

Is the climate right for you and your company to acquire and utilize videoconferencing? It really depends on the numbers. If your company or organization does a lot of traveling to conduct meetings, negotiations and technical/management discussions where dialogue is important, then you probably should make an evaluation of the costs and benefits of videoconferencing.

Today, there is an emerging culture using videoconferencing beyond the traditional marketing and sales departments. Purchasing, engineers, production, research, accounting and even human resources departments are increasingly beginning to use videoconferencing.

Videoconferencing will never completely replace face-to-face meetings, but it will alter the frequency and necessity of physical meetings. For example, instead of routinely going to Europe six times per year, videoconferencing could perhaps enable a monthly videoconference meeting to be augmented by actually traveling to Europe once every six months.

Today, 75% of commercial videoconferencing is international. Due to the lingering worldwide recession, companies and organizations are forced to find ways to save money, doing things more effectively and differently to produce better and faster results.