BERLIN — Stranded travelers and businesses are turning increasingly to audio and video conferencing to get around the global travel restrictions caused by the volcanic eruption in Iceland, businesses that supply conferencing services and equipment said Monday.
Aaron McCormack, chief executive of BT Conferencing, a unit of the British telecom operator BT and the world’s largest provider of conferencing services to businesses, said his company had seen a 35 percent increase in demand since the volcanic disruptions.
About 80 percent of the increase has been demand for audio conferencing, and 20 percent for video conferencing services, said Mr. McCormack, who is based in Boston. He added that most of BT’s large corporate clients, like PepsiCo and Philips Electronics, had increased their use of video conferencing to cope with the travel disruptions.
“We have seen the largest demand in audio conferencing because when people are in an ad hoc fashion having to react to the situation, this is what they do first,” Mr. McCormack said. “But we are also seeing an increase in video conferencing.”
To meet demand, Deutsche Telekom said it was offering its largest corporate customers the ability to use the operator’s own internal conferencing studios and equipment, made by Cisco Systems, at eight German locations. The operator said it planned to extend the offer to other big customers temporarily on an emergency basis.
Skype, the Internet-based telecommunications operator, said the company had also seen an increase in video conferencing over its service since the volcano’s eruption.
“Skype has seen increased volumes in voice and video calling over the last week,” said Kim Milosevich, a Skype spokeswoman in London. She said the company was unable to release more specific figures on the increase but had many anecdotal accounts of its use.
In one case, a couple stranded in Dubai decided to televise their wedding vows over a Skype video conference to guests gathered for their wedding ceremony on Saturday in England, Ms. Milosevich said.
Andew W. Davis, a senior partner at Wainhouse Research, a company that tracks the video conferencing industry, said the disruption had prompted him to revise his growth forecast for industry sales of conferencing equipment this year to 15 percent from 10 percent.
Mr. Davis said global sales of video conferencing equipment and software reached $1.5 billion in 2009.
“We have seen from every major disruption like this an increase in the use of video conferencing,” said Mr. Davis, who is based in Duxbury, Massachusetts. “I am 99 percent sure that we will see another increase this time also.”
Keith Gyford, the managing director of First Connections, a video conferencing operator based in Basingstoke, England, said he also expected the unprecedented travel disruptions to lift interest in the company’s telecommunications business.
“These types of events only raise the profile of the technology,” Mr. Gyford said.
Ruth Rowan, the marketing director in Britain for BT who normally works from London, has been stranded since last week at BT’s regional center in Boston, where she had been attending a research conference.
“We have had many of the international guests at the conference who have been stranded in Boston like me coming into our offices to use our conferencing services,” Ms. Rowan said. The director of a local government council in Britain was planning to hold her regular two-hour council meeting by BT conference from Boston, she added.
“People are definitely using conferencing to cope with the situation,” Ms. Rowan said.
Cisco Systems will standardize its videoconferencing systems to be compatible with products offered by other companies, a top executive said Monday, Bloomberg News reported from Helsinki.
Cisco, the world’s largest maker of network equipment, recently acquired Tandberg of Norway for 19 billion kroner, or $3.2 billion, in an effort to capture more of a growing market. Some single-screen products from the two companies already talk to each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment