Green Friendly Adoption at Adobe: Implementing Connect Pro for Internal Use

Employees at Adobe are using Acrobat Connect Pro to host virtual conferences, collaborate on-line with peers and conduct customer facing meetings. This has transformed and enhanced the way employees collaborate internally while boosting overall productivity and reducing operating cost and risk to Adobe.

Over the last two years, more than 80% of company employees have used Acrobat Connect Pro and over 70% have established their own virtual personal meeting rooms. The end result has been that the number of Acrobat Connect Pro meeting minutes have jumped from 35 million in 2006 to more than 80 million minutes in 2008.

From a green friendly perspective, the internal adoption of Acrobat Connect Pro has dramatically helped reduce employee travel cost, reduced delivery of training expenses and lowered overall print costs to Adobe.

The powerful multi-function conferencing features in Acrobat Connect Pro have spurred widespread use throughout Adobe. Marketing and sales personnel use Acrobat Connect Pro to conduct live online seminars and events that educate existing customers and generate new leads. Human Resources taps the Adobe web conferencing solution to train employees on new policies and programs while information technology (IT) staff streamlines internal service desk requests, IT emergency response (ITER) activities, and external customer support calls.

Across Adobe, employees use the solution for meetings on an ongoing basis. The company even conducts its company-wide employee meetingswith thousands of attendeesusing Acrobat Connect Pro, saving the company rental costs of in-person event space and employee travel while supporting convenient, easy participation from any location.

According to Mark Garrett, Chief Financial Officer at Adobe, "Over a two-year period, Adobe has saved nearly $10 million in travel costs approximately $1000 per employee since adopting Acrobat Connect Pro."

According to IT Conferencing Services Manager Joe Monteon, "Acrobat Connect Pro is extremely easy to use, with low barriers to entry. With Acrobat Connect Pro, users can share their desktop on the fly and instantly communicate any detail visually." This has helped save on both cost of printing and rental of in-person event space particularly with large off-site venues

An example of this: a recent internal event like the Semi-Annual Spring Tech Conference a three day conference across three different continents (North America, Europe and Asia) was held via Acrobat Connect Pro this year. The end result was that it helped eliminate the need to fly in attendees while still allowing organizers to access local presenter resources across different time zones and geographic locations.

The event consisted of three parallel three day training tracks that were delivered by 20 different presenters remotely across the world. Each presenter then delivered their respective session using Acrobat Connect Pros innovative breakout room capability. After the conference ended, all the presentations were archived and made available to attendees, on-demand in case some could not attend because they were tied up in other concurrent sessions during the actual conference.

Another example of how Acrobat Connect Pro has proven beneficial at Adobe is across the IT organization within Adobe. IT staff use the web conferencing solution for everything from better management of emergency response activities to conducting technical training via prerecorded sessions and providing service desk assistance to internal and external customers. Director of IT Customer Support and Engineering, Bill Weatherwax explains that Acrobat Connect Pro enables IT staff to more easily diagnose and work through technical issues because they can access the shared desktop of the individual experiencing the problem.

"Sharing a computer screen and visually walking through a problem is much easier than trying to talk through an issue you can't see, says Weatherwax. "The first level of support can now diagnose and fix issues 80% of the time, dramatically reducing the number of calls that have to be escalated to the second level. Before Acrobat Connect Pro, we could only fix issues on the first pass 53% of the time. The cumulative savings of our faster resolution can total hundreds of thousands of dollars annually because we handle 15,000 calls monthly from employees."

With Acrobat Connect Pro, IT emergency response (ITER) activities run smoother than ever. Teams in North America, Europe, and Asia can work together in virtual 'war room' environments in real-time to analyze and solve critical outage issues. By using features such as breakout rooms in Acrobat Connect Pro, every project team member can assess and join the virtual collaboration environments with instant insight into actions taken and recommendations from global teams. Sessions can be recorded and made available to team members that missed a meeting or used as a learning tool for dealing with future IT issues.

By retrofitting customer briefing room for these types of events placing cameras that point to a briefing room podium and installing ceiling microphones in the room sales folks can now conduct customer briefings at a customers convenience but still remotely. This cuts out on cost to the customer and on Adobe resources having to fly out onsite.

In a recent year, Adobes North American field marketing team conducted 399 eSeminars, averaging of 291 registrants. Overall, the eSeminars reached nearly 116,000 participants, increasing awareness of Adobe solutions and interest from prospects, while reducing the cost of travel for everyone involved. Direct sales teams have also found that Acrobat Connect Pro is an effective tool in closing deals. In the end, this lets Adobe sales team reach out to customers and prospects remotely, generate interest in Adobe solutions, and shorten the sales cycle while keeping everyones costs low.