If there is one company you would expect to have a lot to say about the potential green impact of collaboration and networking technology on corporate sustainability goals, it is Cisco.
So, I suppose I’m not surprised that so much space is given to this topic in the press materials for its new 2010 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report released this week. It is a classic case of a company eating its own dogfood. In this case, that dogfood comes in the form of the TelePresence videoconferencing technology and WebEx and MeetingPlace virtual meeting services.
In the report, Cisco discloses that its general-use TelePresence units are in action about 50 percent of the time, based on a 10-hour business day. As of the close of fiscal year 2010 last summer, the company had 334 Cisco TelePresence rooms of its own in 73 different cities around the world (not counting what customers or partners have installed). Cisco’s use of WebEx and MeetingPlace as a means of averting physical business travel has helped double the company’s use of these conferencing services in each of the past two years. In FY2010, Cisco employees attended 19.3 million millions of people hours (that is, one person attending for one hour). That is a hell of a lot of meetings.
I know that Cisco’s appetite for WebEx is extraordinary because I occasionally help the company’s worldwide channel partner programs divisions with messaging and am intimately familiar with WebEx. I wanted to disclose that in the context of this blog, although the messaging that I have worked on has nothing to do with Cisco’s smart grid, green IT or corporate sustainability strategies.
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