Some Companies in Mexico Turn to Videoconferencing

Posted by: Rachael King on May 01

It hasn’t been the best week for Rafael Chavez, the general manager for Tandberg Mexico. First the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, hit Mexico City and his office shut down for the week, sending him home to work. Then, on Monday, a 5.6 magnitude earthquake rocked the city as well. Yet, Chavez says he’s been fortunate that none of his family, friends or colleagues are ill. Still, Chavez has managed to take meetings via his personal telepresence device at home — one of the benefits of working for a videoconferencing equipment maker. “We’ve been able to continue working without further problems,” he says. Chavez says he’s noticed an uptick with some organizations in Mexico recently increasing their videoconferencing licenses, particularly in financial institutions, government entities, education and healthcare.

Similarly, IT consulting firm Dimension Data has asked its 36 employees in Mexico to take client meetings and internal meetings via videoconferencing whenever possible. Earlier this year, the company had already spent quite a bit of effort integrating both desktop and room-based videoconferencing systems from Tandberg, Cisco and Microsoft to make it easy for employees to use videoconferencing and to reduce travel costs. When executives at Dimension Data use videoconferencing for meetings instead of traveling, they save about $20,000 per meeting. “We’ve saved 50% in internal travel costs,” says Mark Slaga, CTO of Dimension Data. So far, all the employees at Dimension Data are healthy too.