Case Study: IBM Takes Webcasting to the Desktop

Of course, while IVT Studio can be used for live webcasts, it is the tool's video-on-demand capability that is most important, says Wainhouse Research's Weinstein. "VOD is the time shifter and geographical boundary breaker," he says. "When we do webcasts we see an initial surge of viewing for the live event, and then usage trickles up over time for the VOD. But another advantage of VOD is that it becomes a bit viral. Someone looks at it and forwards a link to someone else. And now you're communicating as a team at everyone's convenience. That's good stuff."

Easy Come, Easy Go
Kahan believes that one of the most attractive aspects of IVT Studio is its simplicity and ease of use. "The primary reason we wanted to use the Studio product was mainly to empower the average user to create multimedia communications without having any professional knowledge of how to do that. The biggest asset of the system is that anybody can sit down and use it. It doesn't take up time for training. It didn't take a lot of resources to get it up and running. That has huge value to me," says Kahan.

"It doesn't take a production team to build the content. A 5- to 10-minute presentation takes an individual about 30 minutes. If you forget, you can do it fast at the last minute. You can do it in the morning and have it out the same morning." Kahan points out that if the tool shaves 30 minutes off of a meeting attended by 20 people, that's 10 man-hours saved. That's ROI, he says.

"We put out the system with no training," says Kahn. "It came with no training material whatsoever. We just said to users: 'Start using it. If you have any problems, here's some reference material.' And not one person, not one, actually needed to reference the reference content. People adapted to the interface quickly. Even senior level executives, who typically like to have their hand held, were able to produce their content and do everything they needed to do in nothing flat."

"Rich media is important because it attracts eyeballs," says Weinstein. "With tools like IVT Studio we are taking this eyeball-attracting content and making it easier to create and more cost effective to create. This is a good trend. But it is evolutionary. What will start to be revolutionary is when we are able to combine all this content with some of the advanced management and searching systems that are out there. Content is only valuable if I can find it when I need it."

Indeed, the other key attraction of IVT Studio is it's "backend," according to CEO Pulier. "The critical thing here is central management," he says. "Without central management corporations will not deploy an application like this. Central management provides the ability to determine where certain groups of people can put content, what type of content they can create, what templates they can use." Another important part of central management is the ability to keep track of statistics. Pulier points to banks, for example, whose stringent regulations require them to track everything very precisely in a central way. "And that's what our system does," he says. "Those competitors of ours who have just a tool without a backend are really not competitors."

Real ROI
Along with saving money by cutting man-hours wasted in ineffective meetings and saving money by lowering production costs (studios, crews, equipment, etc.), one of the other major ways in which IVT Studio delivered ROI to IBM was by reducing staff travel, says Kahan.

One of the questions asked of IBM staffers on the pre-pilot survey was whether they expected to use webcasting in lieu of travel. About 40 percent of the IBM employees in the test group answered in the affirmative. But six months later, the number of people using webcasting to replace travel had increased to 50 percent.

"That's a substantial number," says Kahan. "If I could save 50 percent of the cost of travel for IBM's entire workforce -- that's about 340,000 people -- that would add up to a lot of money."

Another nice thing about IVT Studio is that it doesn't cost much. "The system was inexpensive enough for us to recover our costs within one year," says Kahan. And once it is in place, the more it is used, the greater the ROI. "As more people get on the system, the price per-person per-webcast goes down," says Kahan. "Let's say, for example, that today a video webcast to 100 people costs between $2,000 and $5,000. When you increase the number of users to 200, the cost per user is halved, and if the audience were 1,000, the cost per user would be between $2 and $5. And imagine if 10,000 people see the webcast."

The Future of Webcasting at IBM
After completion of the pilot project a few months ago, IBM decided to go ahead and purchase IVT Studio. Kahan is currently implementing a full-fledged "production" version of the system that will open up webcasting to many more IBMers. "Our plan before the end of the year is to multiply up to several hundred or even thousand content creators," says Kahan, "and the back end could eventually get as large as IBM itself."

He says that IBM is "looking to enhance the product"-- doing things like making it more accessible to the visual and hearing handicapped, for example. "And we want a lot more empowerment on the management of the content itself, empowering the user not just on the front end but how to manage the back end content and do data mining. It's pretty exciting what we're planning."

Asked to predict which of the four usage categories will be the highest in percentage in the immediate future, Kahan says he doesn't know. "I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now we see another completely unexpected new usage category emerge. When you allow people to use communications systems open-endedly like this, sometimes you are surprised and delighted by the outcome."

IVT's Pulier concurs with Kahan's prediction: "When the power is given to everyone," he says, "we'll be seeing a lot of interesting uses."