Swiss Re licenses Interwise Web conferencing technology

Interwise successfully won Swiss Re's business against more than a dozen other hosted and on-site conferencing vendors based on its demonstration of customer-client commitment, security features, functional breadth, pricing and technical superiority. Interwise Connect enables customers to deploy complete conferencing capabilities to every employee for unlimited usage like email, for a fixed price. It accelerates business processes and solves the challenges of connecting distributed and mobile workforces, customers and supply chains.

"We chose Interwise's on-site IP software approach for its ability to provide the full range of business functionality required by our many types of users, its fixed price/unlimited usage model, and its ability to truly meet all of our infrastructure requirements," said John Schurdak, head of group platforms for Swiss Re. "By choosing Interwise, we are able to bring together multiple tools, including bandwidth optimisation in one solution. Equally important, Interwise combined the pricing and technology to enable us to give conferencing to everyone in the company, like email."

Swiss Re is geographically dispersed, with approximately 8,800 employees operating from more than 70 offices in 30 countries. To unify its remote teams and optimise business processes throughout its global locations, as well as ensure more secure, consistent and economical communication and collaboration throughout the company, Swiss Re decided to consolidate its multiple conferencing vendors and tools in favour of a single, corporate-wide standard. After an intensive one year evaluation process, Interwise was named Swiss Re's conferencing provider for demonstrating:

• A superior commitment to meeting Swiss Re's business, user and technical needs
• The ability to provide integrated voice conferencing and Web conferencing from a single platform—allowing users to conduct stand alone telephone conferences, web meetings, eLearning classes and web seminars with one product
• Bandwidth optimisation between the main hubs, especially between Fare East and the headquarters in Zurich
• A fixed price/unlimited usage business model which, together with enterprise-scalability, allowed Swiss Re to give everyone in the company access to conferencing
• The most advanced on-site solution—able to integrate fully with the company's existing security, administrative and calendaring systems including SSO, Reverse Proxy, LDAP and Lotus Notes
• A unique, distributed software architecture designed for flexible deployment, performance and manageability
• Easy learning and self explicable user interface without large training sessions

"We are very pleased to have won this milestone relationship with Swiss Re," said Tony Gasson, Vice President of EMEA Operations for Interwise. "We offer technology, business value and an on-going commitment to customers that is unmatched in the industry. The Swiss Re project provided an excellent opportunity to showcase Interwise's market lead in integrating complete conferencing capabilities into client's business infrastructures and enabling them to give this unified communication resource to everyone in the company."

Interwise Connect integrates voice, Web and video conferencing within a single application for unlimited audio conferences, Web meetings, virtual classes, Webcasts, broadcasts and on-demand recordings. Deployed as a core business application to all employees, it improves the frequency, speed and quality of both internal and external business activities. It delivers strong cost and business ROI to companies with distributed and mobile workforces, customers and supply chains.