Polycom® RealPresence® Mobile Enables Global Insurance Leader Catlin to Expand Collaboration From the Conference Room toAnywhere Its International Team Conducts Business
- Catlin improves teamwork, collaborative decision making and productivity
- Catlin has over 70 video enabled rooms globally, with RealPresence Mobile driving more usage of Room Systems
- Polycom secure HD video collaboration is critical for Catlin employees to work beyond normal time zones and borders
London, UK – 17th July 2012: Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced that global insurance organisation, Catlin, is using Polycom® RealPresence® video collaboration solutions across its global offices to provide its workforce, partners and clients with a meeting experience that offers face to face business communications without boundaries, no matter where in the world they are based or what equipment or technology they are using.
Catlin group specialises in both insurance and reinsurance with about half of the company’s workforce based at its London office. The Catlin UK Syndicate 2003 is the largest syndicate at Lloyd’s with a £1.43bn capacity. With a network of offices in more than 55 cities worldwide in 21 countries, premium volume in 2011 was $4.5 billion and the company employs nearly 2,000 people. Catlin sought to upgrade to a high-definition UC video collaboration solution that would seamlessly tie into other room technologies and meet other conferencing requirements.
Working with Polycom partner ProAV, Catlin made its first deployment of high-definition video collaboration with Polycom® RealPresence® Room Solutions, (HDX® 9000’s and HDX® 8000’s). Catlin today has more than 70 video enabled rooms globally and enjoys a world-class work environment with professional meeting, presentation, event recording, video streaming and video monitoring capabilities. Through the use of the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform, video has moved from a ‘nice to have’ to a solution that enables Catlin to improve teamwork, and hasten collaborative decision making and productivity. Meetings now combine multi-party voice; video and content collaboration, using the Polycom RealPresence Platform network infrastructure to minimize bandwidth consumption (by as much as 50-percent compared to competitive solutions) and ensure availability and reliability through the dynamic distribution of calls. RealPresence Platform transforms islands of employees and fragmented communications systems into a seamless video enterprise, which makes enterprise-grade video easily and securely accessible to all authorised personnel whether they’re mobile, remote or on-site.
Catlin operates through six underwriting hubs around the world. The need foreconomical, instant communications is paramount. The investment in video collaboration has changed the way Catlin employees communicate and work. The firm’s staff have now extended their use of enterprise HD video collaboration by using iPads and laptops equipped with Polycom RealPresenceMobile and Polycom RealPresence Desktop software (CMA ™ and M100 Desktop) respectively – enabling users to join video meetings from home or on the move.
“The video and audio conferencing functions have made keeping in touch a lot easier for everyone at Catlin and these are services that we are rolling out globally. Now that we have them, I believe a lot of people would be lost without them,” says James Stratford, Catlin’s group operations manager of UK property and facilities management. “The use of iPads for secure HD video collaboration is a natural extension of Catlin’s communication strategy and has made accessing and collaborating with people on video much faster and more productive. We’re also finding that people are collaborating more from our Polycom RealPresence Room systems with colleagues on mobile video (vs. audio-conferencing), which has led to an increase in usage of meeting room video systems.”
The quality and ease-of-use of the new video conferencing solutions has led to larger usage demand for both internal and external video meetings along with new travel initiatives where any travel booking is now queried to see if the booker had thought of using video collaboration instead of flying. Bringing audio conferencing ‘in house’ has also resulted in cost savings to Catlin.
Standalone quotes:
“The use of iPads with Polycom’s RealPresence Mobile running on them is a natural extension of Catlin’s communication strategy and has made accessing people on video and collaborating much faster and more productive,” says James Stratford, Catlin’s group operations manager of UK property and facilities management. “We’re also finding that people are collaborating more from our Polycom RealPresence Room systems with colleagues on mobile video (vs. audio-conferencing), which has led to an increase in usage of meeting room video systems.”
“We recently deployed tablets to our staff with Polycom RealPresence Mobile video solutions enabled. This has allowed us to implement a more flexible workingenvironment, so employees can work more effectively away from the office,” says James, Catlin’s group operations manager of UK property and facilities management. “Since we introduced this, we’ve seen staff become a lot more productive, mainly due to easier collaboration on the move and less travel time. We have found this to be really beneficial to business as a whole.”
“Catlin is a truly global organisation, and with more than 55 offices in 21 countries, we need first-class communications capabilities, both to allow our employees in different offices to work together and to ensure high-quality service to our brokers and employees.” says James, Catlin’s group operations manager of UK property and facilities management.
“We believe video conferencing is an economical method of communications, with the added benefit that it directly reduces the amount of air travel required byemployees.”
About Polycom
Polycom is the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC) solutions for telepresence, video, and voice powered by the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform. The RealPresence Platform interoperates with the broadest range of business, mobile, and social applications and devices. More than 400,000 organizations trust Polycom solutions to collaborate and meet face-to-face from any location for more productive and effective engagement with colleagues, partners, customers, specialists, and prospects. Polycom, together with its broad partner ecosystem, provides customers with the best total cost of ownership, interoperability, scalability, and security for video collaboration, whether on-premises, hosted, or cloud-delivered. Visit www.polycom.com or connect with Polycom on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
