IBM employees collaborate with webcasting tool

The result, says Joe Kahan, was that internal communication at IBM was getting pretty expensive.

“Mounting costs connected to multimedia communications were inhibiting our business objectives,” says Kahan, an executive program manager at IBM. “Limited staff limited the amount of content that could be created at any given time. Presenting content for global teams also required scheduling far in advance.”

What IBM wanted, he says, was to replace Web conferencing and video conferencing with a communication system that is available any time of the day, within any geography.

“Most real-time systems hinder this design because users are required to be available during one time zone or another,” Kahan says, “rather than when it is best for individual team member’s working hours.”

In 2006 the company piloted a new product, IVTStudio—a video webcasting program that allows employees to create and manage content themselves.

“No production team is required at all. For this reason, we call our deployment of IVT Studio —the Self-Service Jukebox’,” Kahan says.