Treasury at Cisco responded to the company's call to cut travel budgets by chopping more than half a million from its travel expenses over the past three years. To do that, treasury turned to Cisco's own TelePresence technology, which uses high-definition cameras and large video monitors to facilitate meetings among participants in different locations, and WebEx, which allows the sharing of documents and files online.

Cisco's far-flung treasury ranges from its operations in the San Jose, Calif., headquarters to the group in Reno, Nev., that oversees the company's investments, to an office in Rolle, Switzerland, as well as staff in Atlanta, Amsterdam and Singapore. Using three TelePresence units, in San Jose, Reno and Rolle, Cisco's 30 treasury employers reworked their processes to cut back drastically on the amount of travel, while at the same time keeping up with the company's growing business.

While Cisco cut its carbon emissions almost in half since 2007, treasury slashed its carbon emissions by almost 90% over the same period. And treasury cut its travel expenses by an average of 40% each year since 2007, for a cumulative reduction of almost 90%. That translates into cost savings to date of more than $500,000. "It's not just being green for green's sake," says Greg Bromberger, assistant treasurer at Cisco. "We've gotten huge business results from this." And those results go beyond the savings in travel expenses, Bromberger says. "We can all do our jobs better, we can collaborate quicker, we can get to better results because of this technology."