Proven and future-ready TMS replacement for European interior ministry
Large government agency chooses VQ Conference Manager to underpin its mission-critical communications platform.
The Challenge
Replace TMS on a large-scale government conferencing platform
When you’re the ministry of internal affairs for a large European country, dependable communication between distributed teams is absolutely essential.
The ministry was using Cisco Meeting Servers (CMS’s) and almost 3,000 Cisco collaboration devices to support all internal conferencing between 12,000+ of its key employees. The nature of their work means a high-security communication environment is non-negotiable.
As with many long-standing CMS-based systems, Cisco TMS was a central part of the environment. However, with the software reaching end-of-support, the ministry urgently needed a replacement to modernise.
These included:
- Meeting scheduling
- Meeting management
- Analytics
- Device management
If the ministry was to remain on its existing conferencing platform, Cisco needed to move quickly to offer a proven TMS replacement. Above all, this needed to give the customer confidence that its highest-priority meetings would continue to run smoothly.
The VQ Communication Solution
A product that ticked all the boxes – including a proven track record in national governments
In partnership with Cisco and its systems integration partner, VQ Communications
demonstrated how VQ Conference Manager would address the ministry’s specific needs.
Crucially, the fact that our software is trusted by many other large government agencies, gave the ministry the necessary peace of mind to proceed.
The proposed VQ Communications solution included:
- Meeting Services
To support operator-led scheduling and call management at scale, with up to 50 meetings on a single screen. - Analytics
Ready-made dashboards to monitor service and device performance, enabling proactive troubleshooting and strategic reporting by the admin team responsible for this missioncritical service. - Device Management and Automation (DMA)
To maintain security and availability of its large Cisco device deployment, which sees extremely high utilization.
- Deployment Assist
Remote, one-to-one video support for the team setting up the platform - Training
Hands-on workshops to upskill the ministry’s administrators and support teams, ensuring they’d immediately benefit from the full
capabilities of VQ Conference Manager. - Customer success program
Periodic meetings with the VQ Communications customer success team, to ensure the ministry continued to get maximum value from the software.
With the ministry won over, VQ Communications worked fast to ensure our software became available through the relevant procurement framework. This enabled the ministry to purchase a multi-year VQ Conference Manager agreement.
Outcomes
A seamless transition from TMS to VQ Conference Manager
Following a smooth transition from TMS, using VQ Communications’ purpose- built migration tooling, the ministry is now enjoying modernized scheduling, management, and analytics capabilities. These have combined to enhance the experience for administrators, operators, and end users, while driving up ROI of the CMS-based platform.
And with a comprehensive roadmap of new VQ Conference Manager features in development, the ministry will benefit from continued innovation and ever-increasing value from its Cisco investments for years to come.
- Enhanced meeting security
- Greater ease of use for operators and end users
- Streamlined management of its 200+ Cisco video devices
- Full-service observability
- Regular new features
- Long-term commitment to innovation in self-hosted conferencing
And since VQ Communications is a Cisco SolutionsPlus partner, the customer also enjoyed the simplicity of purchasing VQ Conference Manager and the associated professional services through Cisco, as part of its renewal.
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