Verizon puts price on collaboration

Verizon Business is betting that its large enterprise customers want to buy additional communications services to facilitate more and more efficient collaboration among their employees. To that end, the company has teamed with Frost & Sullivan to offer a new tool that will help businesses determine how well their employees collaborate.

The idea is to use that tool, the Collaboration Calculator, to assess how well a company enables collaboration today and produce a Collaboration Index for that company. Once that is established, Verizon Business can also make recommendations on how to improve collaboration, some of which will involve expanding use of communications services.

All of this is based on a study conducted by F&S in 2006 called “Meetings Around the World,” which was sponsored by Microsoft and Verizon Business. It found collaboration is increasingly important to large enterprises both to tie together their global operations and to connect increasingly mobile employees in an efficient way. The study focused on the way technology and corporate culture combine to impact collaboration, said Michael Marcellin, vice president of product marketing for Verizon Business.

“The study addresses the interaction between technology and culture,” Marcellin said. “There is lots of technology to foster collaboration, but the equally important component is how an organization is constructed. If the organization isn’t open to and equipped to support collaboration, then technology won’t solve the problem.”

The emphasis, he added, is on real-time collaboration—not an exchange of e-mails or voicemails but voice, data and/or videoconferencing.  “Real time is key,” Marcellin said. “Sometimes to facilitate that, the corporate culture needs to change.”

The Collaboration Calculator looks at a number of factors, including market and number of employees, an organization’s collaborative culture, the business structure and how it currently uses technologies such as instant messaging, teleconferencing, videoconferencing, Web conferencing and meeting schedulers. Based on all that information, the calculator produces the Collaboration Index and compares that figure to the overall index score in the original “Meetings Around The World” study. The company being studied can compare its score to others within its industry, its geographic region or its size of business.

By attaching solid numbers to a company’s collaboration capabilities, the Collaboration Calculator gives executives tangible proof of the potential need for change, Marcellin said.

“What the calculator does is ask very specific questions about the interaction,” he said. “When we start making recommendations, we may recommend a specific product—we have a great global Net conferencing product, for example—but some of the other recommendations may be cultural or organizational changes. We don’t purport to be able to make those changes happen, but we can point out benefits or show that some other companies, maybe competitors, are doing this successfully. The changes have to be owned by the enterprise itself, but if we can facilitate that, it’s a good thing for both of us.”

The tool is for use by large enterprise customers, many of who have employees scattered around the globe and constantly in motion, Marcellin said.

“Conferencing can reduce travel costs,” he said. “More and more enterprises are looking to contain travel from an environmental perspective. Plus, a collaboration plan can actually be an integral part of a pandemic or business continuity plan. If you can support users in different locations or teleworkers, then you can be better prepared for a crisis.”

In a separate announcement, Verizon said today that it is working with global technology services provider EDS to target a 25% reduction in its carbon emissions in Australia and New Zealand by 2010 by using Verizon Video Conferencing over Verizon Private IP to connect 10 sites across Australia and New Zealand. The videoconferencing is intended to reduce employee air travel by nearly a third while improving collaboration.