Microsoft Video Conference Device Drives Volvo Meetings

RoundTable, a small videoconferencing device introduced last year by Microsoft, is helping to reduce the amount of business travel between Volvo’s offices in Sweeden and the US. The technology allows employees world-wide to join meetings anywhere inside or outside their home offices.

The RoundTable table-top videoconferencing device has five cameras and six microphones, providing a full 360-degree view of a conference room that shows all participants and correctly places their voices, so that their presence seems more life-like. The online meeting device works with Microsoft’s Office Live Meeting platform, which can support video and audio conferences as well as webcasting and sharing data sharing, and is available as standalone software or as a service. It also adds some functionality to Microsoft’s earlier NetMeeting software. RoundTable doesn’t deliver the big-screen, high-definition images and high-fidelity audio of systems such as Cisco Systems’ TelePresence, however, the RoundTable unit is less than 7 pounds and costs just $3,000. Meeting leaders can set it up without a technician, keeping IT related costs to a minimum.

Some Volvo Group employees gather around fixed, room-sized videoconferencing systems for events such as regular online meetings and all-day conferences, but a variety of other included online collaboration tools prove useful for the rest of the company’s employees. NetMeeting is used by about 60,000 of Volvo Group’s approximately 100,000 employees. Those employees hold about 14,000 NetMeeting sessions per month. The company is expanding this number while also migrating to Office Live Meeting, in addition to gradually increasing use of RoundTables.