24-Hour Bandwidth Profile - Aggregate for All MCUs

So . . . your videoconferencing deployment has been growing. Management is taking notice. People are starting to actually depend on the service. But, they’re also expecting more and more from you and your team. Are these the trends in your organization? If the following scenarios sound familiar, an advanced analytics and reporting solution may be an option you’ll want to consider:

1. Your customers need business-related metrics – now. An executive in your organization is concerned about a lack of management coordination between regions. To get a feel for how well the teams are working together, she has just requested information on last month’s volume of videoconferences between your US and European Headquarters offices. You asked for two weeks to get this information to her. She said, “I need it this afternoon, don’t bother.”
2. You need to help others plan. Facilities managers across the organization have expressed interest in knowing how much their conference rooms are being used for telepresence meetings. They are trying to plan their capital budgets for the coming year. Do they need to equip more rooms with telepresence capabilities?
3. Troubleshooting service quality issues is getting tougher. Your technical staff needs more detailed information to resolve a persistent videoconferencing service quality issue in the Western Region office. They complain that the analytical tools provided by the equipment vendors just don’t allow them to get enough good information. And, they really need to explore historical information going back more than 90 days or so. You don’t have the time and resources to have someone spend days sifting through system event logs.
4. You need to control expenses. You just learned that you will have to maintain a flat expense budget for the company’s videoconferencing service into next year – but you know that demand for services will probably increase by 25% or more. How can you determine where that increase in demand is coming from? Where can you get good resource utilization information, so you can shift resources to meet the growing need while keeping the budget under control?
5. Management wants higher levels of visibility and accountability. You are now ‘on the hook’ to meet SLA targets. You need to start reporting service performance metrics. But, how are you going to measure performance? How are you going to communicate performance against SLA metrics to management and the business units? You can’t possibly add the burden of generating monthly reports to the list of things your oh-so-thinly-spread staff already has to do every day. You are seriously considering asking for more staff just to get this new reporting job done.
6. You need quick and easy access to solid decision support data. You are assembling your budget for the coming year. You’ve included new infrastructure components (more MCU ports) to support increasing demand in Europe. You know that the new Southern Region campus is going to need a dedicated support team to ensure that service quality expectations will be met. But, you know what’s coming – pushback, requests for better validation of your budget requests. You only have so much time to get this plan together, but you are are finding it difficult to produce the decision support data needed to justify the proposed investments and address those inevitable questions from management.
7. Network planning is becoming a critical issue. Your delivery partners over in the Network Infrastructure organization have just told you about some serious service quality issues in the Chicago office. They’re convinced that the volume of network traffic generated by your Chicago videoconferencing systems is clearly the issue. They’ve asked you to put a cap on usage in Chicago. But, you are equally convinced that videoconferencing usage is probably not high enough to be the sole cause of the problem. Where are you going to get the 24-hour network bandwidth usage profile data you need to respond and help develop the right plan for mitigation of the issue?
8. You want to stay ahead; be proactive, not reactive. It seems that every day, the number of decisions you are asked to make is increasing. People are no longer satisfied with best guesses and responses like, “We’ll need a couple of weeks to investigate, and we’ll get back to you.” The pace-of-business is demanding that you and your team make better and faster decisions. You’re wondering if you can even keep up, never mind staying ahead . . .

DesigNET’s SMART Analytics and Reporting Platform is all about helping videoconferencing service managers stay on top of their services. Check out how Adobe Systems has been able to handle rapid service growth by making SMART reports an integral part of daily service management.

• Run Your First SMART Report
• How to Read a SMART Report
• Save Time with Saved SMART Reports
• Save More Time with Scheduled SMART Reports

Excerpted from the Wainhouse Research Bulletin Vol. 11 #18 September 9, 2010.

Download Wainhouse Bulletin PDF

For more than 15 years, we’ve known DesigNET as a provider of consulting services to end user organizations managing large deployments of videoconferencing technology. At the Wainhouse Summit in Boston we were surprised to hear that DesigNET has gone into the software business.

WRB: What’s this transition to analytics and reporting software all about? Is there a connection to your consulting business?

JI: Actually there is. As you know, DesigNET has been helping clients with quantitative analysis, performance assessments and benchmarking of their videoconferencing and other enterprise collaboration services for a long time. But, we know there are limits to the consulting model. The data collection and analysis process is complex, manual and lengthy. That means it takes a couple of months to generate results, and the cost of a ‘performance snapshot’ is pretty high. Conferencing service managers need to have much easier access to good performance information every day, not every two years. So, I assembled a team of very smart people and we set out to deliver on that vision, and the result is the new SMART Analytics and Reporting Platform for Videoconferencing we’re previewing here at the Summit.

WRB: We see reporting capabilities included in just about every piece of management software that comes to market in this industry. Why is there a need for another one?

JI: A few reasons. First, our view of reporting is very different; we focus on total service management. We address the manager’s real needs – measuring, managing and communicating overall service performance. So, our reports are designed to address the specific problems service managers face every day. They directly support key processes like proactive service level management, implementing and documenting SLAs, capacity planning, troubleshooting and forensic analysis, usage pattern analysis, cost control, managerial accounting and more.

WRB: That’s quite a list.

JI: There’s more. Let’s talk about ‘data’ versus ‘information’. Those reporting tools you mention typically provide the ability to query an endpoint, a call management server or MCU for recent CDR listings and counts. But, that’s just raw data. There’s no ability to filter and identify important patterns in the data, like unusual dialing patterns or frequency of specific error conditions. To answer the hard business questions, running those queries is just the beginning of an analytical process. Our SMART platform has all that analytical intelligence built-in. We analyze and transform that same raw data into a much more powerful historical, multi-dimensional data set that allows service managers to clearly see those important trends and patterns and how they are affecting service. Our platform is a true productivity enhancer. Our users want to focus on dealing with important management issues, rather than spending their time trying to make sense of a confusing mass of raw data.

WRB: You say good reporting can make a real difference. Can you give our readers an example?

JI: Sure. Let’s take an example that gets into network planning and cost control. In this case, the customer is a conferencing service delivery team that’s part of the IT department. They partner with the network services team to get the bandwidth and QoS required for videoconferencing. A frequent issue these groups face together is deciding how much bandwidth is needed at a particular location to support video. Before historical bandwidth reports were available, this was a lot of guesswork. The network team was typically forced to over-buy to ensure that the load during peak demand periods will be met. Now that this team has access to detailed peak bandwidth usage reporting, that network purchase can be tuned to exact requirements, reducing bandwidth cost. Additionally, being able to view a 24-hour bandwidth profile allows better decisions to be made about time-shifting of certain non-real-time applications (like off-site backups) to avoid peak load periods, which improves videoconferencing service quality and the efficiency of the other applications. These kinds of savings can easily cover the cost of the reporting service.

WRB: Did you say “Service”? Isn’t this a product?

JI: We’ve structured our pricing and delivery model as a SaaS offering. Customers pay an annual subscription fee – and that’s it. We did this to make sure the capability is easy to purchase and maintain. Whether customers choose the secure cloud-hosted delivery model or an on-premise installation, they automatically get new features, updates and support as part of the subscription. We’ve also taken up-front setup and integration fees out of the picture to further reduce the barriers to adoption.

WRB: How are you bringing the new service to market?

JI: As you might guess, building out a big direct sales organization for the SMART Platform is not attractive to us; we’d rather work with a few select managed services partners who really know the space and can help get solutions into the right hands. That’s why we have engaged with great companies like Telaid and Omnipresence. And we’re currently in discussions with a number of additional partners who understand the value proposition and see how it can make their customers more successful.

Courtesy Wainhouse Research 34 Duck Hill, Duxbury, MA 02332

We had a great reaction to our presentation at the Wainhouse Summit in Cambridge, and many of you have asked if we can make the presentation available. Here is it in two parts. Enjoy!

Part 1: I provide some background on the growth of videoconferencing at Adobe.

DesigNET-Adobe Wainhouse Summit 2010-07-21 Part 1 from designet on Vimeo.

Part 2: Adobe Conferencing Service Manager, Joe Monteon, focuses on how the DesigNET SMART Analytics and Reporting Platform is a critical part of Adobe’s service management strategy for videoconferencing.

DesigNET-Adobe Wainhouse Summit 2010-07-21 Part 2 from designet on Vimeo.

On July 20 and 21, 2010 we attended the Boston Wainhouse Research Summit as a sponsor. It was an excellent, targeted event attended by about 160. The attendees were all well-versed in conferencing and collaboration technologies. We joined about eight companies in the booth/demo area, where we showed off our new SMART Analytics and Reporting Platform for Videoconferencing. The demo attracted a lot of attention from service managers interested in gaining better insight into their operations and needing better ways to stay on top of service performance.

Joe Monteon and two members of his Conferencing Services Team at Adobe Systems came out from San Jose for the event. On Day-2, Joe and I gave our presentation about use of advanced reporting in support of all aspects of conferencing service management. Joe gave six examples of how accurate and timely reports gave him the strong decision support data he needed to address several challenging issues relating to network capacity planning, communication with senior management, proactively addressing day-to-day meeting issues.