Business consultancy megalith Deloitte has signed up with communications equipment supplier Nortel for the latter’s complete package of managed videoconferencing services to cut the consultancy’s travel bill and reduce its carbon footprint.

The annual value of the contract has not been released but is reported to be multi-year and worth millions of dollars. Nor will Deloitte divulge how much it expects to save from the scheme.

Under the agreement with Nortel, Deloitte's global organization and its member firms in up to 130 locations worldwide will be able to obtain telepresence and open standards-based videoconferencing services.

"Being able to meet clients and colleagues in real time without travel is an efficient, effective and environmentally considerate way to address their needs, " said Yezdi Pavri, managing partner at Deloitte Canada's Toronto office.

According to Nortel’s calculations, a company spending $23 million annually on travel can use telepresence to recover as many as 385,000 hours of lost productivity, reduce its carbon footprint by up to 4,200 tonnes and save up to $7 million a year.

One company cited in Building the Successful Virtual Workplace, a 2007 Nemertes Research benchmark of IT executive best practices, found that it could cover the cost of multiple, dedicated, high-end telepresence facilities and a managed telepresence service with as little as a two to 3 percent reduction in international travel.

Nortel has also launched the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator, an online utility which allows customers to model network deployment scenarios and calculate associated cooling costs and local power costs by region and other factors.