Deloitte Canada Takes Advantage of Telepresence for Business and a Greener Globe

Deloitte Canada is one of the member firms of the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu network of firms. Deloitte professionals provide accounting, financial advisory, consulting, and tax services to clients big and small around the globe.

Deloitte Canada is taking advantage of telepresence to enhance the productivity of its professionals, reduce travel time, save costs and be more environmentally considerate.

Challenge

Deloitte professionals throughout the world are increasingly relying on video and teleconferencing as a critical element of the firms' green initiatives. However, its video conferencing was under utilized because the image quality was poor; the connections unreliable and the technology was difficult to manage and awkward to use.

Deloitte Canada needed a reliable, quality multimedia-based solution with around-the-clock support. They needed a service that would offer them a complete, end-to-end, telepresence experience.

Solution

Deloitte Canada had a Nortel Multimedia Telepresence Solution deployed in its newest Toronto office. The system is easy to use for Deloitte professionals offering web-based reservations, gateways, pre-connected and configured conferencing, proactive testing and performance monitoring, recording and playback on demand and metrics reporting. Deloitte Canada plans to rollout the system to its other offices across Canada.

Benefits

With telepresence, participants forget after five minutes that they are in a video conference; - they can read body language and turn their heads when someone speaks.

According to Richard Sullivan, National Director Business Services, "Participants can take part in a meeting with colleagues from around the world and still make it home for dinner! It's efficient, cost effective and green."

Adds Richard, "From a business services perspective, the fact that this is a fully managed solution means we can rely on a support structure that will do a test call in advance, ensure that everything is in place - my staff doesn't need to have in-depth technical training and the participants simply walk in the room and join their colleagues."

*Footnotes