I’m blogging as I return on the plane from the VoiceCon conference in Orlando and what a conference it was! If I hear “Unified Communications” (UC), “integrated solutions” and a few of the other catch phrases of today’s telecom environment again for a few days, I’ll bust. Don’t get me wrong, I love Unified Communications and I surely love integration of business processes, but I just wish more of those that talk about it could actually deliver it. iLinc doesn’t deliver UC but what we do provide is the essential component of Web conferencing and most of the vendors talking UC could really only facilitate some folks collaborating via phone calls connected/managed through their solutions.
The most enjoyable part of the conference for me was the Cisco (yes, I said the ‘C’ word) presentation on Climate Change with Al Gore, John Chambers and Fred Knight as moderator, from Nashville, San Jose and London respectively, connected via telepresence with the 2,500 audience participants in Orlando. It was a great demonstration of their telepresence product and Gore did his usual excellent job encouraging us to help our planet before it’s too late. Chambers said Cisco used 100,000 hours of telepresence internally last year and saved $150 million and 15 million cubic tons of CO2 emissions from being emitted into the atmosphere. Chambers also talked about some of their global initiatives aimed at helping the environment.
All of the talk about the environment made me even more proud of our iLinc Green Meter and its unique contribution to the environment. Our patent-pending green meter measures the amount of CO2 emissions saved by having a Web conference instead of traveling to meet face-to-face. iLinc’s customers have saved almost 2 billion pounds of CO2 emissions in the last 12 months and they are able to measure savings at the individual and company level. Our next version of the green meter which is scheduled for release in May is further enhanced with the ability to measure other savings such as gallons of fuel, dollars, miles and other variables that customers want to measure and manage.
The next VoiceCon conference is in San Francisco in November and it promises to be another worthwhile event. Maybe some of those vendors will have moved closer to delivering on the promises of Unified Communications. I sure hope so and I hope even more that iLinc is delivering part of that solution.
Posted under Industry Buzz
This post was written by James Powers on March 21, 2008
