Succeed With CMS and VQ Conference Manager

Overview of VQ. What is it VQ does?

VQ is enabling enterprise wide conferencing, based on the CMS platform. We wrap the CMS platform with increasing rich layers of functionality that enable customers to deploy conferencing within a wide scale within an organisation and one of the key things is to do that quickly. There is no requirement, for example to break open the CMS API SDK. You can do everything through a browser; you can get those CMS systems into production mode far more quickly and deliver high volume services on them and ultimately deliver value to your customers. We have a heard of a number of cases where customers have purchased CMS and because of the complexity of using the API those systems have remained in their boxes for one or two years.

So, we’re enabling CMS enterprise wide conferencing and as the following diagram shows we’ve got CMS in the core and layers coming around that, for example, meeting management for concierge services, multi-tenancy, scheduling, single sign on and reporting to call out a few, and then in the outer layer we have applications which are geared towards the end user and help them take control of their conferencing destiny. They can see their conferencing from where they work, be that Jabber or Outlook, for example.

Why do customers come to VQ?

We’ve got the integrated set of tooling that the diagram above shows. So, customers who are coming from the Codian world, (because Codian is going end of life), they can use the meeting management that VQ provides. We’ve also got the tooling that supports the self-service model. For those of you who may not know, the CMS platform was designed to scale and deliver large volumes of users. We provide the tooling that enables you to provision several thousand of this type or several thousand of that type and each group has the right set of calls for their requirements. That automation of provisioning is key because it ultimately enables the big systems (the 25,000+ user systems) to be deployed with actually very few staff because we’re trying to make software do the work. We’ve also got the integrated Elastic search and Kibana reporting so people understand what their system is doing. We’ve also got the increasing range of self-service tools that sit around this in the form of Jabber extension, Outlook Add-in and Plug-in and our IOS phone app. And we’ve also added Single Sign-on and this is significant because it’s secure and it enables two factor authentication (2FA). One of the areas we’ve been successful in is Federal Government.  2FA is quite unique to us and has enabled us to make significant design wins in that particular vertical market.

What are the principle challenges customers are facing?

There are many, but the broad vectors are as follows.

Self-service; customers want to enable employees across the organisation. There may be several 100 or thousand users, (we also have 50,000 and even 80,000 user opportunities that we are following). We are enabling end users to work across the organisation and with the impact of Coronavirus there are a large number of companies who are looking to enable their workforce to work from home. This is enabled by the scalability of CMS and what VQ enables. Self-service is a big thing and it’s what CMS was designed to do and it does it incredibly well.

The other vector we see is the Codian/Telepresence blades are going end of life at the end of May, so many customers are looking to replace those. CMS is the answer and we provide a richness that enables those Codian users to migrate their workloads onto the way VQ enables meetings to be managed.

Security is another vector and we’ve added Single Sign-on and SAML2 authentication and This is significant because it includes 2FA and certainly when you get to the Federal (DoD), intelligence community or government areas, that 2FA is a key enabler.

The final vector Is Reporting and Logging and we use Elastic search and Kibana to deliver best of breed reporting to customers in terms of what their systems are doing.

We enable each of these particular vectors to be addressed and what we find is quite often customers start off with a particular set of requirements and then begin to think how their services will evolve and start to appreciate that VQ has got the breadth of functionality so we can take them from where they are in the early days, through to more sophisticated deployments.

Customers are looking for a solution where rather than doing one thing they can buy a solution which will start with one thing and grow out and solve a range of evolving needs. That has proved very successful.

If you have questions about VQ Conference Manager, join the ‘Ask VQ’ Webex Teams space http://cs.co/JoinVQ or drop us an email (info@vqcomms.com)