Excellence in the Enterprise
Wachovia: A Three-Legged Stool
With locations in 49 states and 40 international cities, Wachovia is one of the largest financial services firms in the world. And like any international brokerage firm, the company never sleeps; at any given moment, some of its offices are up and running, which means there’s a constant need for up-to-date market data and analysis. What better way to deliver that information than by streaming it to Wachovia’s 97,000 employees’ desktops?
That was the conclusion reached three years ago by Wachovia’s Video Network division, which had previously delivered corporate video communications via satellite. But the division soon discovered that the move to streaming was going to be anything but easy. "The server-based technology available at the time was cost- and governance-prohibitive," says Patty Perkins, vice president of desktop video for Wachovia Video Network. "Our network was an amalgam of merged companies, and the IT division had all they could handle with maintenance and rebuild." So in 2004, the Video Network put out an RFI and, after receiving responses from several vendors, decided that a secure, peer-to-peer, on-demand approach was right for them.
Wachovia partnered with Kontiki on a pilot program to 4,000 employees, with no significant increase in load or activity seen by the company’s IT network architecture division. By December 2005, the Video Network received enterprise-wide approval to roll out desktop video on demand—featuring all of the network’s satellite broadcasts—to all of the company’s employees. The network automatically delivers "Take 5," Wachovia’s five-minute information and news program, to every employee’s desktop each workday, and employee response has been "100% positive," Perkins says. Quarterly earnings broadcasts are also delivered automatically, and users can subscribe to a monthly line of business programs and special events as well.
Today, Wachovia works with Kontiki (now owned by VeriSign) and its P2P technology to distribute all of its video, but hosts the content internally on its own server farm. All the content is produced by Video Network staff in their state-of-the-art broadcast studios in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is delivered to desktops using Windows Media 9, though Perkins says that desktops within the enterprise are upgrading to WM 10 as they are migrated to Windows XP. To protect network bandwidth load, Wachovia blocks outside internet streaming sites, meaning that all video watched by employees is delivered securely via P2P.
Today, the Wachovia Video Network has 18 full-time employees and hires contractors as needed, Perkins says. Next on Wachovia’s agenda: targeted delivery of rich media to individual business units, followed by delivery to telecommuters and bank customers and partners.
Key to the desktop video on demand initiative’s success has been that the Video Network division partnered with other units—including network architecture, IT vendor management, and the CEO’s office—from the beginning to ensure enterprise-wide buy-in. "Every decision was made together, and the business unit always listened to and respected IT’s recommendations," says Perkins. "The rigor of our analysis and the close business unit/IT partnership we developed satisfied the upper level of IT management."
Perkins likens the success of the video on demand project to a "sturdy, three-legged stool," and her metaphor provides a model that other organizations would be wise to follow. "Leg 1 is a strong partnership between the Video Network and IT. Leg 2 is the choice of the right vendor," she says. "Leg 3 is daily professional and engaging content."