Metia WFH month 1: 43,149 chat messages, 2.9TB of daily data and a 661% spike in video calls

Team Metia, like many others, has been adjusting to the new normal. All our offices around the world are now working at home for the foreseeable future, so we’ve become reliant on our technology to not only get the job done but also keep in touch. And so far, so good.

While health workers and supermarket staff are the real heroes for us all, from a narrow business perspective, a big virtual hug to all IT teams for keeping at least some of the wheels of commerce turning over.

Doubtless its pifflingly small compared to corporations but I love that our own team can report the data behind our transformation in the past month:

- The number of active collaborative team sites has increased by 88%
- The number of daily 1-2-1 online conference calls has increased by 661%
- There have been 43,149 chat messages between us
- Every day we store and back up more than 2.9TB of data

To connect with our customers we’ve used every type of online collaboration tool... from Microsoft Teams, Webex and Zoom to Houseparty (not that last one, maybe).

Internally we’ve encouraged using our video cameras to get as close to face-to-face communication as possible. I suspect that’ll become more important as the WFH novelty wears off and contact becomes increasingly important.

Our IT infrastructure and services has been moving into the cloud over the last few years. That preparation has definitely paid off.

Having experienced the pain over 30 years of different technology waves (64K modems anyone?), I’m slightly in awe of how well the cloud vendors and telco’s seem to have managed to support the massive spike in demand they must have experienced. Doubtless there will be much more extraordinary datapoints to be shared from them.