When meeting participants arrive, they dial the number on a touch screen phone (often run over VoIP) and the conference is up and running.

At Accenture, Modruson initially installed telepresence locations in Chicago (where Modruson and some of his IT team reside) with another branch office in Frankfurt, Germany. In June of this year, Accenture’s CEO, Bill Green, wanted Modruson to present to him and his executive reports who were meeting in Frankfurt about his latest IT initiatives and what Modruson calls Accenture’s Collaboration 2.0—using the latest collaborative technologies for his globally dispersed workforce. “Normally, when you have the opportunity to present to the senior leadership of the company, you jump on a plane and go,” says Modruson. “But they were in Frankfurt and I was in Chicago. So I would have to leave Wednesday, fly all night and do the meeting in Frankfurt on Thursday, and come back Friday morning just exhausted.”

So Modruson decided to put his telepresence implementation to the test in front of the most powerful users in the company. “The meeting took me one and a half hours rather than three days,” he explains. “Did I save money on a plane? Of course. But I would have been jet-lagged both ways, and in many ways that’s more significant.”

The Cost: Money and People

Modruson says he saved about $5,000 to $7,000 on that trip, if he wants to play the numbers game. But he says the productivity gains from unnecessary travel, coupled with cutting down on the wear and tear that comes with it, really made the modern video conference an attractive option. In November, he says 10 to 12 staff members held a video conference that saved an overseas trip for all of them (and saved tens of thousands of dollars). “We feel a reduction in international travel between cities will more than recoup our investment,” Modruson explains, before adding, “not to mention the qualitative benefits of reduced wear and tear on our people and improved productivity by avoiding long overseas flights.”

That makes sense to Forrester’s Schooley, who says cutting the cost of travel will be the low-hanging fruit for IT departments looking to justify telepresence implementations. While companies can do ROI studies showing the money saved, the real gain will come in the form of increased productivity; if workers no longer need to travel as much, they won’t waste their time in security lines and won’t come back after a red-eye from California or New York bleary-eyed and exhausted.