Case Study: Videré Brings LifeSize Conferencing to Investment Firm

The Blackstone Group L.P. is a publicly held, leading global private investment and advisory firm with total assets under management of approximately $98.2 billion (as of September 2007). Headquartered in New York, Blackstone has nearly 600 people in 12 offices across the United States, Europe and Asia (including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Paris, Mumbai, Hong Kong and Tokyo). Its alternative asset management businesses include the management of corporate private equity funds, real estate funds, funds of hedge funds, mezzanine funds, senior debt vehicles, proprietary hedge funds and closed-end mutual funds. The Blackstone Group L.P. also provides various financial advisory services, including corporate and mergers and acquisitions advisory, restructuring and reorganization advisory and fund placement services.

For Blackstone, aging, legacy videoconferencing technology was replaced by a total enterprise solution created to address specific needs and expectations. This included:

- Best-of-breed, state-of-the-art, affordable video communications.

- Exceptional HD video quality.

- Superior audio quality enhanced and ensured by specially designed audio technology.

- A/V integration with high-end customized room design for every room layout and user.

- Secure and reliable network infrastructure and management for seamless and flexible site connections.

PROBLEM

For many years, The Blackstone Group had embraced the use of videoconferencing technology for strategic business meetings, effectively and efficiently linking executives and senior management with staff and business partners worldwide.

However, Blackstone’s legacy, standard-definition video conferencing technology offered less-than-impressive video and audio quality and suffered from persistent and disruptive BlackBerry interference during meetings. As a result:

- Users were dissatisfied.

- The technology had lost credibility among senior management.

- Utilization of the systems was low.

- The potential value of the technology was not being realized.

Blackstone CIO Harry Moseley was tasked with updating and replacing the existing video systems with a higher-quality video conferencing solution for six to nine meeting rooms in the United States and Europe. Moseley looked at several high-end telepresence solutions, but they were expensive, lacked versatility and provided little opportunity for customization.

After seeing a LifeSize Room system demonstration featuring HD video, Moseley called upon Videré Conferencing to learn how this technology could best be implemented at Blackstone. Moseley suspected LifeSize’s sophisticated HD video system would address Blackstone’s needs and offer an outstanding price-to-performance value.

SOLUTION

Videré Conferencing initially installed several LifeSize Room systems in Blackstone offices in the United States and the United Kingdom. It wasn’t long before Blackstone’s executives embraced the new HD quality system, and the use of video conferencing was again on the rise. LifeSize’s exceptional audio and video quality, ease of use and value as a productivity tool so impressed senior management that video conferencing soon became part of the culture within the firm. It thus became obvious to Blackstone and Videré Conferencing that expanding videoconferencing from a point-to-point offering to a full-blown enterprise solution would boost business productivity dramatically.

Videré Conferencing provided the expertise necessary to expand Blackstone’s network of video conferencing systems. Additional LifeSize Room systems were installed in locations including high-end executive boardrooms, personal meeting rooms and offices, and the homes of senior executives, so that all parties could participate in meetings at any time from virtually anywhere.

Videré Conferencing’s expertise in systems integration and in providing video conferencing as an enterprise solution assured the implementation could be customized to cater to the needs of executive end users in a variety of locations and for a variety of applications.

Systems were set up to interoperate seamlessly over Blackstone’s private network. Installations grew to greater than 50 endpoints in the United States and abroad. Identical network infrastructures were set up in the United States and the United Kingdom, including two 20-port Codian multipoint bridges, gatekeepers and gateways, allowing participants at multiple locations to simultaneously communicate and collaborate. With Videré Conferencing’s high-touch implementation and support, a small IT staff within Blackstone now handles all system and network management.

One particularly interesting challenge with Blackstone involved a large conference room that seats more than 60 people and can be divided into three separate rooms. Videré Conferencing’s solution involved designing and installing identical, individual control systems in each smaller room. Now, each room can operate on its own or, when opened up, as part of a large, expansive boardroom setting. Displays can be quickly and easily added as needed based on the number of meeting attendees. And when the room is used for large-scale videoconference meetings, the integration of voice reinforcement technology ensures audio quality remains superior, without echo cancellation issues, for the far-end locations as well as between meeting participants in the immediate room.

RESULTS

When Blackstone conducts mission-critical strategy meetings utilizing the LifeSize video network, there is zero tolerance for failure. With an event as significant as a corporate IPO, videoconferencing becomes instrumental in efficiently facilitating the process. Through the deployment of this technology, Blackstone executives have unlimited access to each other and videoconferencing has become the norm when doing business internally and with partners and clients.

According to Harry Moseley, CIO of The Blackstone Group, "We have been very pleased with LifeSize Room and the value it brings to our organization, as well as the great support from both LifeSize and Videré Conferencing."