United Bank of Africa (UBA) is one of Africa’s leading financial institutions. It offers banking services to more than 7 million customers and has 750 branches in 18 African countries. It also has offices in New York, London and Paris, through which it connects people and businesses across the world. It offers comprehensive financial services, such as retail and corporate banking, cross-border payments, and investment banking, among others.
UBA has been through a period of rapid expansion over the past three years. It has seen affiliate banks in 16 African countries come on board. This expansion has resulted in the group’s communication infrastructure being under pressure. Due to this,the group decided to invest in an integrated communications platform to deliver the flexibility and dynamic resource allocation they needed for Unified Communications (UC).
Details of the platform
UBA required a platform that would deliver an integrated telephony and video conferencing solution with the flexibility to accommodate the growing number of disparate and geographically-dispersed end-points.
UBA decided to go with a mix of Polycom HDX 7000 room telepresence solutions and Polycom VVX 1500 D Dual Stack (H.323 and SIP) business media phones based on a Polycom RealPresence Platform.
The Polycom RealPresence Platform is a mix of industry-leading bridging, virtualization, management scheduling and gatekeeping systems. These enable the customer to connect the most people in the highest quality at the lowest cost, both inside and outside their organisation.
The RealPresence Platform for the UBA consisted of the Polycom RealPresence Collaboration Server 2000 realtime multimedia conference platform, the Polycom RSS 4000 recording and streaming server, the Polycom Recording Studio 2000, and the Polycom Video Media Center (VMC) 1000 solution and live broadcast/streaming solution.
The company also invested in Polycom Digital Signage (PDS) 2000 systems plus 100 Polycom CMA Desktop systems. UBA was satisfied that the RealPresence Platform installed at their head office in Lagos, delivered the integrated network functionality and connectivity they wanted, while ensuring an unsurpassed collaboration experience for users. They were happy that the solution was an open-standard, scalable and flexible platform to take them forward.
UBA revealed that in the past, executives and board directors would have typically flown around the country and the continent to attend meetings. This wasted up to four days of valuable time for each meeting and resulted in fatigue, disruption to normal business, and additional expense.
The Polycom solution has resulted in more effective collaboration, has reduced the cost of telephony across the organisation and has also saved travel time and costs. The Group Financial department has estimated that the travel cost saved by the new platform will have paid off the equipment in the first year of use itself.
As the Polycom RealPresence Platform delivers has delivered an open standards-based foundation for deploying, adapting and extending the UC ecosystem, UBA is looking to bring outside collaborators into the network.
These collaborators are the different financial and technical teams working across multiple geographies, as UBA now has the freedom to connect with any proprietary platform, anywhere, at anytime.
Now you know more about how UBA solved its communication and collaboration problem using UC. They chose a solution that is open, flexible, and scalable and connects to diverse geographies. Here’s to improved UC and collaboration every single time!
For more information on how to set up a scalable Unified Communications solution for your business, contact Actis at 022-30808080 or at contact@actis.co.in.
(Content courtesy: www.polycom.com and images courtesy: www.capitalnetworks.co.uk and www.vmatrix.com)