SkyDox Selected by Punter Southall

SkyDox Ltd has been selected by Punter Southall Group, UK actuarial, pensions and financial consulting organizations, to help enable group collaboration and ingenuity.

The Punter Southall Group encourages an entrepreneurial and innovative approach within its range of businesses. This ability to move fast and to offer creative solutions has enabled the Group to grow rapidly, and over the past 20 years, establish itself as a major player within markets as diverse as actuarial consulting, pension fund administration, wealth management and financial advice.

Over the past two years the Group has carried out a complete technology upgrade, including building a new datacenter and virtual computing environment; and undergoing a desktop hardware and software refresh. In this process, IT Services identified a requirement for file sharing and collaboration, and recognized in SkyDox a unique ability to instantly create collaborative groups to focus on new opportunities. Given the fluid and dynamic nature of the Group’s business, the membership of these groups is constantly changing, rendering conventional document management solutions insufficiently agile to meet this need. IT Services have been piloting the use of SkyDox within their own team, and following a trial, plan to extend SkyDox to all parts of the business during 2012.

The Group’s technology improvements are laying the groundwork upon which it can continue to expand and introduce new products and services for its customers. In its next phase of development, the IT Services department plans to further extend solutions that will underpin and support the continued rapid growth of the business. In addition to SkyDox, tools already deployed include Microsoft’s SharePoint and CRM Dynamics, and IBM’s FileNet.

John Rogers, IT Director at Punter Southall Group comments: "We are impressed with the way in which SkyDox has been designed to work the same way people do, supporting their ability to work together and share documents, while retaining important controls over security and confidentiality. It offers a tremendous opportunity within the Group, because of its ability to support an entrepreneurial and creative approach to business."

Punter Southall Group is a business with 800 staff in eight business units operating in a range of market sectors with offices across the UK and North America. The Group has approximately $12.3 billion assets under management and $27.7 billion assets under advice.

SkyDox platform goes beyond basic file sharing, file synchronization and storage and collaboration tools. It enables users to share, store, co-author and manage files and document-centric collaboration in the office, remotely and through mobile devices. The platform delivers social business tools, such as activity feeds, online meetings, presence indicators and dynamic email alerts to users when materials are uploaded or modified, as well as when new comments are posted.

SkyDox allows users to assign folder and document-level access rights and permissions to prevent the downloading or forwarding confidential files to another party without authorization. The ability to track file access and viewing at the page level also allows users to determine if – and when – the document was opened, with whom it was shared, and which pages attracted the most interest.

Ali Moinuddin, SkyDox Chief Marketing Officer, comments: "The IT function at Punter Southall Group provides a centralized service to its subsidiaries, and the Group will find the ability to securely share and collaborate on files simply and efficiently invaluable."