Printer vendor Ricoh has promised to reduce its carbon footprint after signing a deal with Polycom and Telstra for the roll-out of an HD video conferencing system.
The move is also purported to reduce Ricoh's travel costs by up to 15 percent annually, saving the company around $40,000 a year.
Ricoh will use Polycom equipment to link the company's headquarters to five other sites throughout Australia via Telstra's Next IP network, as part of a $440,000, three-year maintenance contract with the communications giant.
Rob Livingstone, Chief Information Officer at Ricoh, said that Polycom beat off several competitors to secure the deal.
"There were a whole range that we looked at", said Livingstone.
Livingstone said the consolidation of the HD videoconferencing industry - which in recent months included Cisco's acquisition of Tandberg and Logitech buying out Lifesize - was not a factor in his decision.
Livingstone said he was less concerned with "the ownership of the business" than the vendor's "ability to deliver the appropriate technology.
"We go through a process of due diligence to assess the risk of the supplier, based on public information, and if we are not comfortable that the supplier is pre-qualified to supply us then we would not consider them," he said.
Price was only one of the factors in determining the winning tender, he said.
"The breadth and depth of service was really the key thing that was influential. Because this is a premier capability for us, the capability of the hardware and the applications and the quality of the product was of primary concern to us because it is largely customer-facing. So we were not chasing the cheapest deal," he said.
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