Nestlé selected Kontiki to help engage and educate 140,000 employees worldwide using video. Today, it is used to give Nestlé employees a voice, enabling internal communication and collaboration with no impact on the network.

Nestlé is the world’s leading nutrition, health and wellness company. With headquarters in Switzerland, Nestlé has offices, factories and research and development centres worldwide.

Prior to 2011, Nestlé distributed educational video content directly to employees via streaming servers in its data centres. The limitations of this approach meant reaching remote employees in difficult locations was almost impossible.

Various work-around solutions were tried such as posting DVDs to each location and asking employees to gather in rooms to watch content together on a big screen, but they were not satisfactory and reaching every employee was never truly achieved.

The Rise of Video 

As the internal popularity of video grew, so did the problem of how to distribute it quickly and efficiently to every employee, in every location.

The traditional method of streaming video directly to the users consumed too much bandwidth and slowed down other business critical applications. Whilst reaching remote employees was still an impossible task.

At the same time as this problem began to escalate, Nestlé C-level executives expressed a desire to run a monthly live online event for all employees. They demanded a group-wide solution to live video distribution. This kick-started a new project for the Nestlé IT team.

Solving The Delivery Problem 

They began exploring ways to deliver video to every employee, in every location, more efficiently and without significantly impacting budget.

After initial investigations, it soon became apparent that traditional streaming methods such as using server appliances to cache content locally and upgrading bandwidth would require significant capital expenditure and due to the growing volume of video content, was not a scalable solution.

After a market-wide search, they were introduced to Kontiki, who offered a peer-to-peer approach to enterprise video distribution – light on the network and budget friendly with no hardware,
or additional bandwidth required.

For Nestlé, one of the most appealing aspects of the Kontiki solution was its ease of use and its ability to peer clients in different sub-nets – a big win for sites with segregated networks.

So, after a series of pilots and network tests, Nestlé deployed Kontiki on 120,000 end-user machines in 2011.

High Quality, Network Efficient Video Delivery 

Nestlé started using Kontiki’s VideoCentre to distribute video content to all employees. Then in November 2011, Nestlé used Kontiki to successfully broadcast its internal business awards event live to all employees, at a high quality and with no impact on the network.

Frederic Ballara, Nestlé Network Architect comments: “From a technical point of view, I have no complaints. The peer-to-peer approach is very effective and efficient. We are now reaching the point where 80% of our content is peer-to-peer.”

“It is very network friendly. We are able to reach every user in remote locations without investing in hardware. I am not aware of any sites that have needed to be upgraded to accommodate Kontiki.”

“Since deploying Kontiki, I have touched the settings on the client once in four years. From a network point of view, I don’t hear about it, which means it’s the perfect solution. One of the best we have.”

Giving Employees A Voice 

In January 2012, Nestlé implemented a world class internal portal, powered by Microsoft Share- Point as their company intranet. Kontiki’s integration with SharePoint has allowed Nestlé to create a tab within SharePoint for employees to access internal video content easily. In April 2012, Nestlé employees were granted the right to upload and share their own video content via the intranet.

In 2012, Nestlé uploaded an average of 386 videos and broadcasted 7 live company events every month to every employee. By the end of 2012 Nestlé had a total of 5,300 videos available for employees to view, regardless of location and 362 active uploaders.

Geneviève Reymond, Senior Specialist (Collaboration & Mobility), Digital Service Unit at Nestlé comments, “Kontiki has enabled communication and collaboration with video amongst employees without impacting the network, saving us money and bandwidth through the use of LAN instead of external Internet networks.”

Extending The Reach Of Video 

Thanks to the Kontiki success story, Nestlé is now exploring ways to extend the delivery of internal video even further – empowering employees to run their own live events, rolling Kontiki out across iOS and Android mobile devices and integrating Kontiki with end-user tools such as Chatter.