Leading North American Bank Solves Employee Engagement Problems With Vbrick

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This leading North American Bank operates across all of North America, in Europe, and the Caribbean and continues to expand. It has tens of thousands of employees globally and often needs to communicate with them by video simultaneously and across all the various geographic locations where it operates. It also needs to frequently communicate with subsets of its employees in various combinations of locations. All of this bank’s networking and infrastructure grew organically over time as the bank expanded and was then further complicated by a major acquisition. As a result, the overall network varies dramatically from location to location with differences in underlying technology, throughput, and capabilities.

This large North American bank had to be able to stream large events at scale despite severe issues with network bandwidth and seven different vendors handling various portions of its enterprise video solution. These large events needed to operate successfully across multiple domains and networks. In addition, it was critical they would work for up to 60,000 employee attendees with as many as 25,000 active at one time. At the time, the bank was only able to support around 10,000 attendees, and that was with buffering and other delivery issues.

The bank used these streaming video services to provide all-hands meetings, town halls, investor relations meetings, and location-specific employee relations information.

It was struggling, however, to deliver the necessary webcasts at the volume of simultaneous attendees and the number of required webcasts per month. The goal was to be able to manage at least 30 webcasts per month with a mix of webcasts in local areas and globally.

With the increasing number of webcasts, the bank hit a point where network congestion was an insurmountable problem and it could not fulfill its vision for employee communications. The bank needed to deliver cohesive global messaging to all employees while also ensuring consistent and valuable information across regions. Additionally, it sought to tailor regional and local messages to meet the unique requirements of each area, and it needed to do so while adhering to stringent regulatory and compliance regulations. About a year and a half ago, the bank made a concerted effort to solve the problem.

It started with Vbrick rolling out a very intricate enterprise content delivery network (eCDN) solution. Vbrick’s secure, flexible eCDN solution includes multiple delivery technologies that were key to supporting the bank’s extremely complex network configuration.

The bank had originally turned to Vbrick for its Distributed Media Engine (DME) technology which is the building block of its eCDN. As the rollout occurred, the bank also realized that Vbrick’s peer-to-peer solution would be crucial to bridge the areas where the DMEs couldn’t fit into the complex network. The eventual solution relied on five DMEs and over 1,000 Vbrick peer-to-peer meshes designed to deliver high-performance video to bandwidth-limited networks. Vbrick combined this multi-modal eCDN with its enterprise video platform (EVP) for flexible and adaptable live streaming to reach the bank’s global and regional employees while meeting the regulatory and security standards mandated for any major financial services organization, by default.

In addition, the bank had been paying a la carte for its video services – an expensive proposition – and during the transition, Vbrick moved the bank to a full enterprise plan so it could grow its video capability more cost-effectively with a saving of over 25 percent. Vbrick was also able to use its professional services team to help the bank reconfigure network topologies and recommend best practices to help the rollout succeed.

In 2021, the bank had been able to run between 10 and 20 webcasts per month, with varying success and issues with buffering and latency. Since 2023, the bank has run anywhere from 30 to 100 webcasts a month with minimal streaming issues at less than 0.3% rebuffering across attendees and single-digit support tickets for tens of thousands of attendees.

By using Vbrick’s DME and peer-to-peer technologies, the bank was able to overcome its location-specific and global network topology issues, surmount the challenges of dramatic differences in networks, and deliver enterprise-wide video streaming with no buffering across the range of domains and networks the bank is using.

Vbrick’s eCDN takes the pressure off the network and, with its deep integrations, allows for video streaming delivery, regardless of the client technology – be it Microsoft Teams, Webex, or Zoom.

Because Vbrick’s EVP has flexibility across hardware and software networking solutions, the bank is not tied to one modality and can succeed with hardware or virtual solutions.

The client had this to say about the result: “On today’s event we supported almost 20,000 users across [our platforms]. This would amount to almost 60 GB/S of data streaming across all our networks, with no failures, or reported issues and a rebuffering rate of less than 0.5%. This is a remarkable achievement and is a testament to the hard work put into adoption and continuing maturity of the webcast platform. Thanks also go to our vendor, Vbrick.”