We spent some time looking at different options. We tried a few high-end solutions, that deliver great quality, but they are too expensive to rollout to many offices.

Surely you can choose to have a few video conferencing hubs so you can cut down on intercontinental travel, but research that shows if people need to travel anyway they generally choose to travel all the way instead of doing the shorter travel to a VC location.

Hence we decided to investigate alternative, more cost efficient solutions. We ended up with LifeSize and Tandberg as close contenders based on desk research and demos. The final choice was made after having test units of both vendors in house and using them on our own network. Tandberg is more mature and polished, but we found LifeSize to work better with low bandwidth and they are a little cheaper.

The great news is that almost all our offices joined the project and we are looking to implement most of them in the first quarter of this year. Even better news is that our staff is eager to start using it. So I look forward to see many of them on screen soon – and to break even on the project in the first year.