Customer Challenge
Provide an effective video and audio conferencing platform with minimal management overheads to support the global operations of a US Department of Defense agency.
A United States Department of Defense (DoD) agency was planning to bring an outsourced audio and video conferencing service in-house. The organization has several thousand employees around the world, and its teams in each location change frequently.
To enable these individuals to collaborate effectively, the new system would need to remain up-to-date with regular moves and changes. It also had to integrate with non-CMS collaboration platforms in other federal agencies.
Furthermore, to minimize costs, the service needed to be manageable by a very small team. This demanded high levels of automation and full end-user self-service.
World Wide Technology, who works with the agency as a trusted technology adviser, recommended the Cisco Meeting Server (CMS) and VQ Conference Manager as the solution.
The VQ Conference Manager Solution
VQ Conference Manager provides a suite of proven tools to meet the customer’s demand for a large-scale self-service system that can be managed by a very small team.
The CMS is designed for large-scale, self-service conferencing, and VQ Conference Manager offers the tools needed to set up and run the service in the way the agency required.
VQ integrates seamlessly with the customer’s Active Directory system, ensuring the frequent employee moves and changes are automatically reflected in the CMS collaboration service. This has the double advantage of giving staff instant access when they join or move roles, while maintaining centralized control of permissions.
As part of this user provisioning, VQ Conference Manager sets up each employee’s always-available virtual meeting Space – an essential enabler of truly self-service conferencing.
Users can then invite others to their Space, and manage audio and participants during meetings, using the VQ Add-in in Microsoft Outlook. Advanced in-call features enabled by VQ Conference Manager, such as DTMF tones, support the customer’s ability to connect CMS-based conferences to those on other platforms.
For the team managing the system, the VQ operator dashboards and Analytics provide the insights they require to proactively monitor how the service is performing and identify where additional infrastructure
is needed.
Business Outcomes
Successful pilot lead to the global rollout and expansion of Cisco Meeting Server estate.
With support from WWT and VQ , the DoD agency installed and configured its Cisco Meeting Server audio and video conferencing service. Overseen by an admin team of just two individuals, the initial 100-user pilot was a big success, which has given the agency the confidence to roll it out to the remainder of its employees globally. The agency is not anticipating having to expand the administration team to support this much larger service.
Thanks to the insights provided by VQ’s Analytics, the agency has identified where it will require additional hardware capacity to support the full rollout. As a result, it has procured additional Cisco Meeting Servers to meet this forecast demand.
Partner Insight
This project was among the first in which World Wide Technology deployed VQ Conference Manager alongside Cisco Meeting Server. Erik Nielsen, who manages the federal engineering delivery services team at WWT, reveals the product has quickly become regarded as indispensable…
“VQ Conference Manager enables us to offer CMS customers the great collaboration experience we want them to have. After my team met VQ, the team came to me and said we should be incorporating it in every CMS proposal we do. Seeing that level of buy-in from people who can be sceptical of new technologies is pretty incredible. What’s then been great is VQ’s commitment to investing in WWT as a partner. They paid for our people to undergo training in the product, which shows how much they believe in it and our relationship. Customers understand the value of CMS. You then need a way to make that magic happen. It’s got to be easy to configure and manage – and that’s what VQ does.”