TW2007 Speech: Aaron McCormick, CEO BT Conferencing

2007.06.04 by John Serrao

The next speech following Mark Trachtenberg's was that of Aaron McCormick, the CEO of BT Conferencing. Aaron took a lower-level approach than Mark, concentrating more on the industry than the mechanisms that drive technological evolution in general. Read on for a synopsis of Aaron's speech.

McCormick's major point was one you might have heard from the Lab's very own HSL often - pay attention to the human factors in the world of conferencing in order to succeed. He referred to this group in the unflattering term of 'human middleware' which in most modern companies is comprised of knowledge workers. McCormick added that these workers do not care much for the idea of productivity but that it is a central point in everyone's life, especially to achieve the work/family balance many modern workers value so highly.

From there, McCormick concentrated on the dynamics of a new network provider business model that, if followed, will guide future telepresence acceptance across all industries. His old model was very simple: most traditional networking companies would evaluate the need of the customer based on what the provider was told. In short they provided the service blind of what the needs of the customer truly were and just assumed the customer knew best. He sighted this as the number one obstacle that has created the sour taste in people's mouths when they think of anything related to video conferencing.

McCormick's new model basically added the human factor to the situation. While this new model is not linear, he adds the human factor element into both planning and support arrangements that contain network services. He again emphasized the importance of human factors in finally pushing video conferencing and telepresence to a mass audience.

On a different tone, McCormick described the Cisco's European telepresence launch as potentially the last legitimate shot the world would give to video based collaboration tools if it did not deliver on the RIO promises these expensive systems command. He followed that up with a fear that this technology could turn into a 'dog walking on his hind legs' - meaning everyone wants to see the technology yet no one wants to buy it. He added that providing a full spectrum of conferencing services will deliver the 'killer app' for video conferencing.

In conclusion, BT added some very interesting data about their companies' own personal CO2 footprint reduction due to telepresence adoption. The numbers were striking, BT has eliminated 860,000 meetings to date, resulting in 97,000 fewer tons of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere. That works out to a savings of $567 for each conference done in a room - and thats even considering the cost of the rooms themselves.