Architecture and design company Woods Bagot has saved more than $440,000 by deploying a video conferencing across its 15 sites in Sydney, Dubai and San Francisco.

The deployment follows a pilot of the twin-screen high definition televisions which were used to host board meetings for its design and project teams, and customer services.

Woods Bagot group IT operations manager said the company decided in December last year to replace its quarterly face-to-face meetings with monthly video conferences.

“The board and our designers are all visual people; everything we deal in is visual,” Lazaris said.

“Our studios frequently collaborate and we needed a platform to bring these virtual teams together - to enable visual collaboration and critiquing.”

He said the reduction in travel helped it reduce the environmental impact of its projects.

The company has completed the inter-office deployment of the Tandberg HD MXP 8000 twin screen video conferencing systems with additional telepresence kit and will now make it available to customers.