The Record - Issue 21: Summer 2021

74 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om W ith 19,000 employees looking after a vast range of global brands including Absolut Vodka, Beefeater Gin and Jacob’s Creek wines, alcoholic beverage producer Pernod Ricard has a large number of highly dis- persed teams. To boost collaboration, the business rolled out video conferencing systems in its global offices. But after realising the potential of Microsoft Teams, it adopted the platform as its default collaboration tool to eliminate the complexity of having multiple video conferencing systems. “We are a significant Microsoft user,” said Antonio Eguizabal, Pernod Ricard’s head of IT operations and global services. “Our IT backbone is based on Microsoft products. All our collaborative work is based on Microsoft services, especially Office 365. So, we made a decision to make Teams our default collabora- tion and communication tool.” Having implemented Teams, Pernod Ricard faced a new problem – how to connect its hun- dreds of standards-based meeting rooms and devices to Teams. Replacing its existing hard- ware with Teams-certified devices would have been costly and time-consuming, so Eguizabal and his team wanted to use the current infra- structure for as long as possible. As a long-time BlueJeans customer, Eguizabal decided to implement the firm’s solution for cloud video interoperability (CVI), BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams. “The architecture of the BlueJeans solution is aligned with our model, which is cloud-based,” said Eguizabal. “If we had to replace all our meet- ing rooms and get new devices that are Teams- compatible, it would have taken us more than a year. So we saved not just in terms of hardware costs, but also time, money and effort to replace our devices. The benefits of that are amazing.” The solution’s ability to support any type of video conferencing hardware was also impor- tant to Eguizabal, because the business was using devices from a range of brands. BlueJeans Gateway works with thousands of room system configurations, enabling any organisation to optimise its use of existing hardware. “And our level of confidence in BlueJeans was such that, when they said that a tool was work- ing fine, we would trust them and verify that it was indeed working,” said Eguizabal. “They have always been there when we need technical and other support.” Pernod-Ricard deployed BlueJeans Gateway for Teams in mid-2020, taking only a matter of minutes for each of its 400 meeting rooms and Beverage business Pernod Ricard implemented BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams to keep its 19,000 employees collaborating from afar by connecting its various video conferencing solutions An invaluable partnership Employees at Chivas Brothers, a Scotch whisky business of Pernod Ricard, use BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams P ROF I L ED : P E RNOD R I CARD