BP, one of the world’s leading energy businesses, employs 75,000 people and is involved in every aspect of the global energy supply chain. Their key activities include producing oil and gas, on land and offshore and moving energy around the globe.

BP also manufacture fuels and raw materials used in thousands of everyday products, from mobile phones to food packaging.

The problem

In support of these global operations, BP’s Group Communications department generate vast amounts of video across the world. They produce the majority of content in-house, through their own team or via external agencies, creating films and other multimedia assets that help train staff and promote BP’s achievements to both internal and external audiences.

Currently, BP holds around 100TB of video, images and documents. Until recently, however, the company found that the media archiving platforms it was using made it difficult to access or share the content across regions.

“The issue of accessibility created significant problems for us,” explains Harold Albuquerque, BP’s Business Information Manager for Group Communications. “For example, if we wanted to produce a new film urgently, and we wanted to pick and choose footage that we’d already produced around the world, this was often impossible without incurring a lot of time and expense.”

Another issue Harold faced was that a proportion of BP’s video content is highly confidential, so he was looking for a management solution with proven security credentials from a provider working with other similar businesses.

The solution

BP chose to implement Imagen, the advanced media management platform in order to address these issues. The transition took just 11 weeks, which is remarkable considering the volume of content involved (100TB).

“We’ve been incredibly impressed with how easy the Imagen platform has been to implement and get up and running,” says Harold. “Partly, this has been due to the system itself and the way it’s been designed for ease-of- use and configuration. However, it’s equally been due to the people at Imagen we have worked with. They have been very supportive, making the project run smoothly by making every effort to understand both our technical and business challenges.”

Implementing Imagen has immediately solved many of BP’s issues, including global accessibility thanks to the platform being cloud based. BP stakeholders, both internally and externally are now able to easily upload, access and download content from anywhere in the world at any time.

Imagen has also helped BP to create two instances of their media archive, with one instance reserved for content that can be made publicly available, and the other for confidential content. They were impressed by Imagen’s track record in this respect, with a number of existing relationships demonstrating their ability to meet security standards and handle highly confidential data.

The solution

With the Imagen media archive in place, BP are now able to operate far more efficiently when it comes to content management and creation.

“Having the content highly accessible and searchable means we’re not constantly reinventing the wheel,” says Harold. “We can shoot footage once, and reuse it many times.”

The Imagen platform also enables BP to store all footage that it produces for future use, which wasn’t always possible previously.

“Often, we carry out video shoots using several cameras,” says Harold. “Previously, we would have worried about how to store all the raw footage and may have only archived the final edit. With Imagen, we don’t have to worry about that anymore. We can easily store everything we produce and make it easy to search for and use again.”

Harold and his team have also been impressed with how quickly content can be made available globally.

“With the previous systems we used, there would be a long gestation period after content entered the archive before you could see it or search for it - sometimes months. With Imagen, the content is available almost immediately to whoever wants to use it. In terms of the efficiency with which we are able to work, and the volume of new work that we can produce more quickly, it’s a game-changer.”

Key features: