Intel is a large multi-national company that employs a highly mobile workforce. As part of Intel’s decision to deploy a predominantly mobile business PC environment, Intel IT has focused on ensuring that they are not just mobile but also equipped with powerful collaboration tools.
Intel’s 91,500 employees work from 143 sites in 62 countries. Project teams often are comprised of employees from multiple sites and sometimes include external business partners. If we look back 15 years ago, collaboration tools were cumbersome and inefficient. Most employees used desktop PCs and phones with voicemail.
To share information, they printed out presentation material to use in face-to-face meetings or sent multiple files using email. Today’s employees have access to a broad spectrum of devices and applications that enable them to easily collaborate with colleagues and external partners.
Tools available now include mobile business PC’s and smartphones, softphones that place calls via the internet, and collaboration applications including webcams, shared file sites, online meeting spaces and videoconferencing. All of these tools are enabled for both wired and wireless for employees working anywhere.
Stuart Dommett, IT@Intel European Manager explains:
“Collaboration is about driving benefits for employees and the business. For the employees it is helping to enhance personal productivity, agility of when and where they can collaborate and ultimately greater job satisfaction”.
The results for Intel include significant business savings. “In 2010 alone, due to just our use of video conferencing tools, Intel saved more than 57,000 travel hours and avoided $26 million in travel costs, not to mention the reduction in our CO2 footprint by more than 22,500 metric tons.
Ensuring the right infrastructure is in place is critical for delivering collaboration tools. For example, Intel IT deploys mobile business PCs that are flexible and powerful enough to support real-time collaboration and advanced videoconferencing. Intel recently upgraded and expanded their wireless network which enables their mobile workforce to access collaboration services, hosted on enterprise servers, at anytime from anywhere.
This combination of advanced collaboration tools and computing infrastructure enables Intel employees to securely share data, brainstorm new ideas, and work collaboratively—independently and in real time—with team members and Intel’s business partners around the globe.
In an environment of accelerating business cycles and geographically dispersed teams, enabling effective collaboration services will continue to be an important focus area for Intel. To read more about Intel’s story on collaboration please download the IT@Intel whitepaper
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