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Eyenetwork Press Releases

Press release 15/06/06

June 15, 2006 Eyenetwork, the pioneering Brighton based videoconferencing company is celebrating its 10th birthday. MD Lisa Honan praises her clients and all those that use videoconferencing to great and visionary effect but she also expresses grave concern about “the continuing business culture that reckons that jetting-off to meetings is higher on the priority list than the future of the planet.” She believes it is now imperative to use technology as a way of avoiding unnecessary travel to business meetings.
Despite the predicted growth in the use of webcam, the use of managed videoconferences is significantly on the increase. Over the past five years Eyenetwork’s turnover has gone up by 600 per cent. In 10 years it has run and managed tens of thousands of videoconferences using high quality ISDN communication links. These get-togethers vary from modest gatherings involving a couple of participants to dynamic large scale conferences involving presenters, stunning visual material and several hundred people at up to 20 locations. “You can get practically everything out of a videoconference that you get out of a physical meeting.” says Lisa Honan.
Without fail, the company practices its own philosophy. It has been independently assessed for its own operations and been declared carbon neutral by a certified carbon balancing agency. Core activities cover point-to-point videoconferencing, multi-site bridging and IP-ISDN conversion bridging, thus enabling different technologies to be standardised.
Striking trends over the past year are the growth of videoconferencing for court and legal proceedings, and the use of the technology by consultants, particularly head-hunters who have become increasingly skilled at interpreting personality and questioning candidates during remote interviews.

Passionate Plea to Business

During Eyenetwork’s lifetime the problem of global warming has greatly worsened. The 10 hottest years on record across the globe have all happened since 1990, and some models propose that in another ten years we will reach the point of no return. Aviation is the world's worst man-made source of CO2, and is the major contributor to global warming. Some 16,000 commercial aircraft pump out 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. This is why Eyenetwork’s MD is urging businesses to turn to videoconferencing technology as an essential business facility.
Looking at just one busy videoconference route alone, such a London to Sydney Australia, this would normally generate 5.61 tonnes of CO2 for an executive flying to a meeting and back. The CO2 savings made by all those companies that have preferred to use Eyenetwork videoconferencing for this particular communication link alone have probably facilitated savings in the region of 30,000 tonnes of CO2.

Eyenetwork Now... and then

Today the company’s 10 staff deal with no less than 2,500 different sites and associates located throughout 72 different countries worldwide. Over 300 meetings are handled every month.
In 1996 when Paul Dickinson and Lisa Honan set up the company, the original aims were completely different. At that time Brighton (then and now Eyenetwork’s base) was enjoying a boom in the new media businesses, and it was thought that a videoconference bureau would help locally based companies to stay off the road, thus reducing road traffic pollution. By 1999 the company had changed its focus, as the local business requirement had almost completely disappeared, and the demands from companies across the world took over. This was the moment when the company sought the help of a Dutch ‘green’ venture capital company.
With a useful injection of cash, the company developed its marketing, technology, organisation and management systems. At the same time companies, consultancies, legal partnerships and leisure concerns all over the world sought out Eyenetwork’s help in arranging face-to-face meetings using video and sound systems. Over one in ten meetings are multipoint, which means they involve a number of different participants at different locations.

Today and Tomorrow

Eyenetwork’s expertise covers the management of international videoconferencing meetings, finding suitable facilities amongst it many associates and also establishing the most cost-effective high quality communications links to make the remote meetings price competitive. Over 65 per cent of its client base is overseas.