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It seems like a no-brainer -- using video conferencing to reduce business travel costs-- doesn’t it? After all, what other business technology gets its own George Clooney movie?

You’d think so. But according to a recent study reported by industry observer Larry Barrett, “only about half of all enterprises have actually installed the technology and only about another 25 percent plan to in the next two years.”

What’s the problem? Why aren’t more companies jumping on such an obvious time and money-saver? According to the report from CDW (News - Alert) cited by Barrett, surprisingly, it’s “poor salesmanship” on the part of the IT departments' video conferencing evangelists.

Salespeople out there will nod wearily at what CDW found: “Too often, they try to sway business leaders to foot the bill for the initial outlay for this Star Trek-like collaboration technology without providing either hard and fast return-on-investment figures or at least some well-defined, clearly articulated and measurable soft ROI benefits for their pet projects.”

Thus it degenerates into “Buy it because it’s cool and a couple guys at my club say they really like theirs.” Or, worse yet, “This is the wave of the future and we should be getting in on the ground floor.” Thank you, next, please.

Of course the fact that they eat bandwidth the way Homer Simpson eats doughnuts might have something to do with it, too.

The CDW survey polled 631 IT and telecommunications managers in November and December, finding, Barrett reported, that “only one in five is currently using immersive telepresence technology for various collaboration, training and sales endeavors. But another 48 percent are planning to implement it within the next two years, making it the hot spot for video conferencing and unified communications vendors.”

And there’s the simple old dogs and new tricks factor. Barrett spoke with industry insiders who said for younger workers and customers “who grew up playing 3-D video games, use Skype (News - Alert) as their primary telephone service, and share videos on Facebook the way their older colleagues handed out business cards, this technology takes enterprise collaboration to its next logical level.”

But of course the bottom line is that once a compelling ROI case is presented to the company bean counters, adoption will be a foregone conclusion. In other words, nothing a good hike in the cost of travel can’t cure.