Experience from early recessions and economic slow-downs suggests that companies that continue to invest in their IT and communications capabilities are both better able to survive the crisis and can be in a stronger position to ride the up-turn - sometimes grabbing market share from their competitors in the process.
Videoconferencing, telepresence, and now unified communications, have each an important potential role to play in helping organizations become more flexible and resilient. These technologies, and the new generations of pay-as-you-use services based upon them, can allow companies to reduce the cost of travel, replacing many face-to-face meetings with effective alternatives.
By implementing these communications tools, organizations can avoid the costs, carbon emissions and general wear and tear to their employees that accompany long-haul flights.
Additionally, firms planning to lay-off employees in order to survive the recession must have the means of enabling their remaining people to be more efficient and productive – benefits that visual communications tools offer.
Furthermore, telepresence and videoconferencing, as key elements of real time collaboration, can aid organisations in making faster business decisions, increasing their agility and responsiveness to customer demand while helping them to realise business goals more quickly.
Last but not least, today’s telepresence and high definition videoconferencing solutions - particularly when linked to managed services - can achieve much higher usage rates, resulting in greater savings and a significantly faster return on investment.
So will companies continue to embrace the very real benefits that visual communications can offer, or will some simply avoid new investments of all types, preferring instead to try to ride out the financial down turn?
Dominic Dodd, Frost & Sullivan Principal Analyst, notes: "For companies able and willing to continuing their IT investments during the recession, visual communications and collaboration products and services should become a central part of their strategy for survival – and for creating a dominant position for themselves, come the upturn."