Defying distance

The New South Wales Rural Fire Service (NSW RFS) has selected the Polycom RealPresence One video collaboration solution to enable seamless, real-time communication between 900 staff across the state and thousands of volunteer members.

The NSW RFS is the world’s largest volunteer fire service, responsible for 95% of the 800,000 square kilometres of the state’s fire and emergency services. Headquartered in Lidcombe, it has 87 offices and more than 70,000 members, including volunteers, firefighters, operational and managerial staff, located across New South Wales. As an existing Polycom customer, the NSW RFS previously used traditional, hardware-based video solutions to communicate and collaborate across the state. To further enhance these solutions, the decision was made to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of the virtualised Polycom RealPresence One solution, a comprehensive offering that combines the complete platform on a subscription-based model.

The subscription-based video solution provides uninterrupted communication in life-critical situations, enabling the NSW RFS to make faster decisions in planning and emergency situations and drive increased preparedness around disaster recovery. The deployment has also brought significant reductions in travel time and cost, helping the volunteer organisation save tens of thousands of dollars in transport allowances and accommodation.

“We were attracted to the Polycom RealPresence One solution because of its scalability, high availability and redundancy. Given the highly critical nature of our organisation and what we do, we need to have 100% uptime, 24/7. If the system goes down, people could be stranded and lives could be at risk,” said Ashley Van Amstel, manager, information technology at the NSW RFS. “The virtual nature of the solution increases agility and resilience, providing us with better disaster recovery and easier backups for business continuity in the instance something was to go wrong. This provides us with the assurance that we will always have real-time visual communications between our teams, no matter what emergency situation that we face.”

The introduction of Polycom’s virtual solution has meant more members of the NSW RFS can have access to video solutions, significantly reducing travel time and boosting efficiency. The Polycom RealPresence One solution has also enabled the NSW RFS to extend its video capabilities to mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones. This significantly increases the organisation’s ability to offer video to its entire member base. NSW is an expansive region, with often hundreds of kilometres between regional offices. With video available on a range of devices, it allows emergency workers to more easily connect despite their location or time.

Further, the availability of Polycom RealPresence One ‘bursting packages’ allows the NSW RFS to easily scale up its number of licences as required, particularly during emergency situations when more people require video capability.

“Polycom RealPresence One enables us to enjoy the full benefits of the solution on an annual subscription fee. This means we can upgrade our package based on demand, reducing total cost of ownership, which is always important for volunteer organisations like ours,” said Van Amstel.

The interoperability of Polycom’s solution also means the NSW RFS can seamlessly interact with other emergency services that may have different unified communication solutions in the organisation such as the State Emergency Service (SES) and NSW Fire, to ensure coordinated efforts across the state.

In addition to emergency planning and response, the NSW RFS actively uses video to provide members with training. Instead of members being required to travel to the company’s headquarters in Lidcombe, which can prove extremely difficult for those based remotely, video extends training beyond the physical classroom. This ensures members are able to be out in the field, ready to take action if needed in the event of an emergency, saving valuable time which would have otherwise been spent travelling long distances.

Image credit: ©freeimages.com/profile/cooperm