Communications Solution Provides Vital Support

Communications Solution Provides Vital Support to Envato’s Global Community of Creatives

Auckland and Sydney, 21 July 2015 – Great teamwork across borders calls for top notch communication tools. Yet Envato, a rapidly growing company supporting the creative industry with online marketplaces devoted to resources, education and finding talent, found that one of its biggest challenges to its continued success was communication.

From humble beginnings in a Sydney garage nine years ago to a 250-strong team serving more than five million global customers, communicating with those working from home and across borders became increasingly important, explains Vahid Ta’eed, IT Director, Envato.

“Envato is all about collaboration. When we develop a new product we assemble a project team. Often it involves people from our international offices, so being able to communicate easily is important if we are going to develop the best product possible.

“As we grew, we found communication became more of a challenge as we brought our people together. The meeting and video technology we tried often hindered rather than helped collaboration, and it became limiting. There’s a real danger of disengagement within a team if people can’t participate because the technology has let them down or doesn’t suit the business.

“We had online meetings with entire teams huddling around a single microphone, or technical glitches that resulted in a huge round of follow up emails. We struggled to find a good product to allow our people to chat to each other. Something had to change.

“To be successful we knew we had to dramatically improve how we communicated, and that came down to the choice of tools. We tried a number of things including robots with cameras, which were very cool, but in the end, ineffective.”

Envato was already using Google Apps, and was looking for a communication solution that would integrate with its existing Google products. Hangouts were the obvious choice, and once tried, Envato were keen to upgrade to the newly released Chromebox for meetings and approached Fronde six months ahead of the product being released in Australia.

Fronde Country Manager, Don McLean, says that Chromebox was a great solution for Envato.

“The solution, along with the value add of organisational education and support from Fronde, has made a real difference for their business.

“Chromebox is easy to use, flexible and designed to cultivate and nurture collaboration for globally dispersed teams. It ties in perfectly with Envato’s community ethos and empowers its employees to maintain complete productivity while working from anywhere in the world.

“In our view, better collaboration leads to better product and customer outcomes, and that’s been Envato’s experience. With Chromebox, Envato has a communications and meeting solution that can grow with them as they take the next step and scale out to the world.”

ENDS

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