Global video conferencing specialist Polycom has expressed an eagerness to raise its profile within the Australasian mining sector, saying its technology has improved significantly over the past few years and is now a much more viable and effective means of communication in a wider range of industry applications.

At present, mining-related business constitutes less than 5% of Polycom’s annual revenue in Australia and New Zealand, with sectors such as health and education, where the volume of demand for video conferencing and communications systems is by nature much higher, accounting for the greater proportion.

But the company is keen to build on that low base and recognises that now is as good a time as any to mount an assault on the mining market. Its first priority in this regard is changing the perception of video conferencing as a tool strictly for use by head offices and only for the largest, richest corporations.

“[Most of] the current crop of managers have not been exposed to this technology previously, so it’s a case of convincing them that it can now address a lot of the issues they had before where they’ve had to transport people to site or wait for the people to get to site,” explained Polycom country manager Australia and New Zealand James Anderson.

Combined with voice and Internet communications technology also offered by the company to form a “unified collaborative communications solution”, video conferencing offered many advantages for the mining industry, Anderson said. He also ran through a list of applications for the benefit of Australia’s Mining Monthly.

He said senior executives could use the technology for purposes such as conducting company-wide addresses, marketing meetings and negotiating mergers and acquisitions without having to fly key staff around, but its real value kicked in when it was rolled out to remote mines and processing facilities.

With these sites properly equipped, it is possible to:

*Quickly and efficiently connect site engineers with company headquarters to review samples and data and report on production challenges;

*Train crews in occupational health and safety procedures without having to fly in trainers whenever a refresher course is required or new employees arrive on site;

*Link up quickly with disaster response and/or medical experts in the event of an emergency so that the incident can be managed with a higher degree of confidence; and,

*As a pleasant offshoot, allow employees who are away from their families to have regular and special occasion video contact with them.

Anderson said there generally were two ways in which potential clients gauged the value of video conferencing – the more tangible savings that could be calculated on things such as travel and lodgings, and soft cost savings that by definition were more difficult to estimate.

“You can get a pretty good return on investment just from savings in hard costs, but the real benefits are the soft costs, which are the ability to react more quickly to incidents, the ability to maintain skills sets more effectively at remote locations and the ability to run their business more efficiently,” he said.

“It’s not so much the cost of travelling to location, it’s the time wasted travelling there and back where you don’t get as much productivity out of the person.

“To get them to site might take eight to 10 hours, they spend two hours addressing the issue and then it’s eight to 10 hours travelling back. If they can travel down a corridor, have a two-hour video call to address the issue, and five minutes later they’re back at their desk, that’s the real value.”

Video conferencing has become more attractive as the price of equipping an organisation with the technology has dropped significantly since it was first introduced, Anderson said. A typical entry-level installation is now about $5000 per location compared with $80,000 in the early days.

To get its message about video conferencing across more effectively, Polycom recently conducted a series of seminars in Western Australia and Queensland where it invited the mining community to view a live demonstration of the technology and listen to views of current users.

Anderson said the seminars had been well received and those in attendance had been extremely interested in the technological advancements that were showcased.

Of the mining and manufacturing companies currently using Polycom’s video conferencing systems, Rio Tinto stands out as the most significant. The giant mining house’s subsidiaries Comalco, Pilbara Iron and Argyle Diamonds have all been supplied with the technology.

Australia’s Mining Monthly