Peter Griffin: Saying Halo to pricey video-link an end to long-haul business travel

Hewlett Packard's head office in Palo Alto, California, looked like a ghost town last week.

I guess chief executive Mark Hurd and his colleagues were on the second floor trying to strategise a way out of the corporate spying scandal that has claimed the company's chairman Patricia Dunn and tarnished the reputation of one of Silicon Valley's major players.

On the first floor, it was business as usual. A group of jetlagged journalists, myself included, were being shown new technology that HP claims could make a good deal of business travel unnecessary.

The Halo Collaboration Studio consists of a good-sized room with three big plasma screens along one wall and a large curved table for people to sit at. Everything is decked out in tan. Halo connects people in up to four far-flung locations via video conference, though the HP people cringe if you refer to Halo as "video conferencing", which has a reputation for being unreliable.

On the other side of the table, five people greeted us as though in the same room. Two were in London, two in New York and a man sat slumped wearily in a seat in Singapore, where it was 2am. The following discussion was notable for how smooth the communication was, better than any videoconferencing system I've used.

The idea for Halo came from Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of animated move maker Dreamworks Animation. With 1200 staff around the world, he wanted a more effective way of allowing people to collaborate on movies without having to travel.

He has installed Halo studios at each of his two campuses in California which are many kilometers apart.

Animators presumably sit in the booths, look at their collages on the big plasma screens in front of them and talk about the next big movie they're working on. You can plug your laptop into Halo so that everyone involved in the conference can see the contents on a screen. It's great for Powerpoint or video presentations. Up to 16 people can participate. A document camera can zoom in on paper documents for everyone to see.

Halo is slowly catching on around the world. Mining giant BHP Billiton has two in Australia to link its offices. Pepsi's four Halo studios, according to the company, have led to the "outright elimination of routine business travel" between its major sites. There are 61 studios in operation worldwide.

The technology is very impressive. Using Halo, you feel like you're involved in something more than a video conference. Your fellow conference members appear life-sized, the cameras are designed to ensure you make eye contact with them and that their facial expressions are clear to see. The communications link is full duplex so people can talk over each other if the meeting gets a little heated. There's no screen stutter, no audio drop-out and the collaboration tools are flexible and easy to use.

I had visions of New Zealand business people running their overseas branches from a Halo booth at the bottom of the world, briefing their London-based underlings before they start their day and the bosses here head home at the end of theirs. Then I asked how much Halo costs - US$425,000 ($648,000) for the room and equipment and US$18,000 a month to cover support and the cost of maintaining the 45Mbps (megabit per second) broadband pipe needed to make Halo work. My jaw dropped.

Pepsico and Canon may be able to justify that expenditure but I doubt any New Zealand company could - with the possible exception of Peter Jackson's Weta Digital.

Halo seems a tad extravagant.

"It may be, but so is putting people on planes and flying them around the world," reasoned Stephen Nigro, a senior vice-president of HP's imaging and printing group.

Even if you can stomach the cost of setting up the studio, HP insists on using a dedicated leased-lined communications link to ensure high quality and secure video and audio communication.

It has developed the Halo Video Exchange Network to handle traffic between Halo suites around the world, sending the various feeds in a way that ensures low latency so that there's no lag when people speak and the audio matches up with their lips. HP says most videoconferencing systems on average use a 1.5Mbps link, which doesn't offer anything near the quality of Halo. Maybe not, but those services cost vastly less and can often run on a company's existing data network.

Halo will only work as a value proposition for companies outside of the Fortune 500 heavyweights if businesses can rent space in Halo on an hourly or daily basis.

With Halo suites in places Kiwis do business with - London, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Sydney, Tokyo and Singapore - companies could arrange video conferences with their staff or business partners on an ad hoc basis. This way companies need not maintain their own video conferencing service and could take advantage of the superior technology.

But there's one other thing that will always limit the effectiveness of video conferencing technology - the tyranny of time zones.

In worldwide video conferencing, someone is usually going to have to stay late at work or venture into the office before dawn.

In the case of the conference I sat in on, the guy in Singapore was the time zone loser. I bet he didn't get any work done the following day. How many employees will put up with that on a regular basis?

Face to face contact is important. But as Katzenberg says: "You travel to maintain relationships, not to work."

For those dreading the air-conditioned nightmare of regular, long haul business trips, Halo will appeal. Now let's see a realistic price.

* Peter Griffin visited Palo Alto as a guest of Hewlett Packard