Cork Company Fosters a New Wave of Lean, Green Business Machines
Meeting.ie helps companies skip the trip to make cost and environmental savings
CORK, Ireland – In an era where companies large and small are falling prey to economic climate change, Meeting.ie Director Roland Steinmetz says it’s survival of the leanest out there. And the online meeting solutions company is feeling bullish about the future.
“More and more businesses are looking to distributed meeting solutions like video conferencing and web collaboration to save on travel costs,” he points out. “Mobile workers – the people who travel for work or telecommute – are the fastest growing workplace segment and companies are looking a lot harder at ways to bring these people together and put them in front of clients without putting them on a plane.”
The result is explosive growth in the virtual meeting industry. According to a report from Frost & Sullivan, video conferencing is poised to grow into a $4.7 billion industry worldwide by 2014. 80% of managers surveyed who have not yet deployed virtual meeting solutions plan to bring them on board over the next two to three years. Steinmetz says that according to the new figures released by Meeting.ie, his company has saved its customers more than 14,000 hours of travel time, not to mention a lot of plane fare.
“The return on investment for particular segments like sales, research and development and marketing is astronomical. We’re talking pennies for a meeting that takes minutes to set up, instead of hundreds or thousands of euros in travel costs for the participants.”
Fewer companies, claims Steinmetz, are motivated by the desire to go green, but the carbon savings made from services like web collaboration, conference calling and video conferencing are unmistakeable. His customers, he says, are poised to save nearly 2,000 metric tonnes of CO2 by the end of 2010. “That’s a lot of trees,” he points out, “Since an average tree absorbs about a ton of CO2 over it’s lifetime, it’s actually a small forest of carbon savings.”
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