Hive Streaming supports Atkins in driving employee engagement and improving internal training

Company background

Atkins strongly believes that the use of video communication is pivotal for the future of the company. For a truly global company that invests in an increasingly mobile professional workforce, frequent use of live and on-demand video is key to driving employee engagement. This is clearly reflected in a strong expectation that town hall meetings run flawlessly and that video helps various business sectors to improve employee engagement, increase management proximity, and facilitate distance learning and training.

The challenge

Atkins’ existing network and video distribution solutions did not possess adequate capacity to fulfill the business requirements of delivering high quality broadcast media with streams up to 1.7mbps per viewer. Offices in the Middle East and India have limited WAN links and are far from local CDN points of presence, making it hard, if not impossible, to deliver video of acceptable quality.

Having examined several options, Atkins concluded that the only cost-effective and viable method of handling large scale broadcasts to 1,000+ participants was to move forward with Skype for Business using Hive Streaming for network acceleration.

How Hive solved the challenges for Atkins

Using their existing corporate software distribution solution, Atkins deployed Hive with minimal time and effort spent on setup and configuration. Atkins started by running a silent test with 1,250 computers in the UK, which proved the network efficiency of Hive Streaming software: the efficiency improvement was a 98% reduction in bandwidth load. A second, larger test, involving 7,500 devices was very positive, demonstrating network savings of 95%. It also enabled Atkins to determine the cause of some hardware-related network issues.

Benefits achieved

1. Live broadcasts streamed to all offices and employees
2. Driving employee engagement and improving distance learning and training
3. No new network investments were needed
4. Saving costs by retiring some of the existing video solutions
5. Gaining a better understanding of video QoE (Quality of Experience), audience engagement, and network weaknesses using Hive Analytics for detailed insights and testing