“Green conferences” has become a more popular concept for businesses which now consider video conferences an effective tool to successfully organize conferences and to minimize possible expenses.
Uong Minh Nam, Deputy General Director of Niem Tin Company (NTC), said that video conferences prove to be the optimal solution for enterprises that want to cut down expenses, save energy, and more importantly, help business leaders make decisions timely and accurately.
Even Vietnam Airlines, the national flag air carrier and leading transport service provider in Vietnam, uses video conferences. NTC has been providing video conference services to Vietnam Airlines since June 2010 under a contract worth $513,000. The solution allows them to connect seven points nationwide so that Vietnam Airlines can join the group’s meeting anywhere and at any time. Besides, the solution allows the airline to save and rerun the conferences if necessary.
Experts all believe that video conference services will be developing strongly in the next few years. Big guys in the telecom industry in Vietnam all have been providing this service, including CMC, FPT, VTN, Saigon Postel, VDC, Cisco and Siemens.
A potential market
According to Phan Thanh Son, Technique Director of Cisco Systems Vietnam, the spending level of Vietnamese enterprises on distant conferences is just equal to 40 percent of that of Malaysia, 45 percent of Thailand and 25 percent of Singapore. This means that the service is not really popular in Vietnam, and it remains a market with great potential for service providers.
Since 2006, the government has been encouraging the application of video conference service in management work, thus creating a wave of video conference applications from the central level to local authorities.
Besides, the reasonable price of connection and the readiness of the broadband service both also have prompted big enterprises to use video conference services in order to improve the cooperative capabilities, increase productivity and reduce the travel costs.
Son also cited other reasons to prove that Vietnam’s market has great potentials for service providers. The low popularity of the service in Vietnam means that service providers still have “room” to develop. Meanwhile, transportation fees have been increasing unceasingly, which has prompted people to save cost on traveling.
Not expensive for small enterprises
Son said that small businesses should change their view that video conferencing is an expensive kind of business.
“The service fees have become more and more reasonable because the prices of equipment have been decreasing, while the technologies have become more diversified allowing users to have many choices.”
After launching the high-resolution X-conference service earlier this year, Viettel Technologies has built up some 800 conference points in Vietnam and foreign countries, allowing them to organize conferences for organizations and enterprises in 100 countries worldwide.
