Poly

London, UK - Jul 17, 2012 : Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced that global insurance organization, 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 specializes 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 for economical, 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 RealPresence Mobile 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.