NEW YORK, N.Y. — Videoconferencing technology company Tandberg released its first environmental sustainability review this week, laying out pledges to reduce energy use and air travel.
Tandberg, which provides telepresence, videoconference and mobile video services, has said it will reduce its carbon footprint from air travel by 10 percent per employee by 2009. It also plans to reduce its energy use per square foot of office space by 10 percent by the same year.
The company calculated benchmark carbon footprints for its United States and Norway operations, which account for about 70 percent of its workforce, by adding up energy use at offices, air travel, automobile travel and greenhouse gas emissions created throughout the life of its products.
Tandberg plans to reduce its air travel though increased use of videoconferencing. Employees currently conduct about 50,000 videoconferences and telepresence calls a month. The company is also working to make it products more energy efficient and switch to more sustainable packaging. Video systems are being designed to automatically go into an energy-saving standby mode, which would reduce energy use by up to 32 percent.
Cisco, another maker of videoconference and telepresence systems, recently touted the savings it has made with virtual meetings. Cisco CEO John Chambers and Al Gore appeared at VoiceCon 2008 in Orlando yesterday by using Cisco's TelePresence systems and spoke about how the emergence of high-quality videoconferencing has the potential to provide a viable solution for businesses looking to cut expenses and carbon emissions.
Chamber said his company has saved $150 million in travel expenses, cutting travel costs by about 10 percent per employee, by using its TelePresence system. The company uses 185 TelePresence systems internally, and Cisco employees have logged about 100,000 hours of videoconferencing, Chambers said.
