AT&T is touting the environmental and business benefits of its services for remote workers and teleconferencing with a tool that lays out company-specific savings.

The AT&T Carbon Impact Assessment Tool is geared toward showing business customers how they can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save money by reducing or eliminating business travel with other communication services.

Using videoconferencing and other services that connect remote workers or employees in different parts of the globe has become increasingly attractive to companies looking to cut travel costs and emissions, as well as make better use of employee time. Cisco cut its air travel emissions 45 percent by using telepresence, while SAP found that each telepresence unit it adds pays for itself within a year.

Company size, number of employees, travel plans and other details are input into the AT&T tool, which then figures out the return on investment, avoided emissions and productivity improvements.

Results are based on what's possible from using any of three AT&T services: AT&T Telepresence Solution, which uses Cisco's TelePresence technology to provide high-definition videoconferencing; AT&T Connect, a conferencing service that combines phone, video and online; and AT&T Remote Access, services for remote workers.

Going beyond the pure emissions and cost numbers, AT&T crafted the tool to show savings in other formats, such as car- and home-equivalents for the amounts of energy and emissions are saved through AT&T's telework solutions.

_{Telepresence image CC-licensed by ShashiBellamkonda/Flickr}