‘Asians are more buoyant on conferencing’

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: As more and more companies resort to the virtual medium to reduce their travel spends, companies like BT Conferencing stand to gain a lot. However, Aaron McCormack, CEO, BT Conferencing in an interaction with Surabhi Agarwal says that the gain balances itself out from the loss of business due to delayed investments. But, he hopes the next growth wave to come from Asia as it expects to double its Asia revenues in the next one year driven by the Indian and the Japanese market. Excerpts:

The global economic crisis led many companies to cut on their travel costs. What kind of opportunities did that create for conferencing?

Firstly, all of us wish that there was no downturn. Even if it is good for certain companies, the human costs of downturns are so high. There are some 100 odd million people unemployed across all countries, which is terrible. In terms of India, there is very little challenge to the domestic economy. Your banking system has been kept very stable and you tend to be growing. In conferencing, it has been mixed. Obviously with people wanting to cuts costs they are using alternatives to travel. That is happening for sure. But on the counter side, when people are unemployed they don’t use a lot of conferencing. If you have customers that have laid off a significant number of people, then most of their conferencing needs to come down. Other thing is that you get a lot of cost pressure. There is a lot of demand from customers to maximise their contracts and get the best price. So those two things pretty much balance each other out.

We almost have a potential of a swine flue epidemic that will see a lot of people preparing for new ways of doing business that will work through the pandemic. Working through more virtual mediums and making sure everybody knows how to use a Web or a audio or a video conferencing solution so that they are prepared for the time when their office has to be shut down or their sales people are not allowed to travel.

How does the balance between new business and loss of business fare?