University of Maryland, Baltimore County Customer Case Study

Transcription

1 University of Maryland, Baltimore County Customer Case Study

2 INTRODUCTION UMBC Customer Case Study About UMBC The Unversity of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is a public research university and a member of the University of Maryland System. The UMBC campus is located on 500 acres and just 15 minutes away from Baltimore s inner harbor. UMBC enrolls nearly 14,000 students and employs nearly 2,300 faculty and staff. UMBC is an honors college and offers over 50 different majors and 32 minors to its undergraduate students. The graduate school offers 40 master s degree programs. Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, has served as President of UMBC since May,

3 Business Challenge Promoting Campus Adoption Jack Suess, vice president of information technology and the University s chief information officer states, UMBC has been using interactive video conferencing at an enterprise level since the early 90 s. What UMBC was lacking was a state of the art video conferencing solution that could be used for multi party meetings, on multiple operating systems, and from any device. Additionally they wanted a solution that could be used campus wide and which would operate with their fixed telepresence equipment. UMBC needed a cost effective, easy to use multi-party video collaboration solution that addressed these issues to accelerate adoption. Jack Suess leads the Division of Information Technology (DoIT), which is comprised of nearly 8o full time staff. As a starting point, Jack looked internally to the IT team at UMBC for answers to the adoption problem. Over the past year his team had been using the NET+ Viewme (formerly SeeVogh) video conferencing solution with mixed results. After assessing the situation Jack requested that ezuce modify the solution to help improve the user experience and make it easier to manage rooms and meetings. With this input ezuce set out to tackle the issues and deliver a new user interface, supervisor portal, and revised meeting format. 3

4 The Solution Viewme NET+ UMBC looked at a number of video conferencing solutions but none could compete with Viewme for its rich feature set, interoperability with legacy telepresence systems and support for Apple, Android, Windows, and Linux. UMBC chose the Viewme video collaboration solution because it met the following criteria which Jack said was essential in promoting widespread adoption across campus: Cost Ease of Use Telepresence Integration 4

5 The Solution Cost Effective With freemium services available from multiple sources, convincing faculty, staff and students to use a university compliant video conferencing or peer-to-peer offering is challenging. Integrating with these services would be cost prohibitive and in some cases impossible. Viewme met all the critera UMBC was hoping for and is at a price point that fit the budget. Viewme allows UMBC to right size the cost of providing visual collaboration as our needs grow and the community of users expands. Also the fact that ezuce has such a flexible licensing model was very attractive to UMBC. UMBC realized that the initial use of Viewme would probably include about a quarter of UMBC s faculty and staff. The fact that UMBC could grow the Viewme licenses over time to eventually enable all 2,300 faculty and staff while keeping cost down was very compelling. Jack says, Since the price of Viewme is really focused on who gets their own meeting room, it allows us to develop a solid deployment strategy and know that we can expand the footprint in a cost effective way over time. Viewme allows CIOs and IT managers to predictively budget for services based on adoption rates rather than estimating how the service will be utilized which avoids over procuring. Viewme is simply at a cost point that we have not seen from any other vendor in the video conferencing space. Jack Suess, CIO, VP for IT University of Maryland, Baltimore County 5

6 The Solution Easy to Use Jack shared that ease of use for both faculty and staff was a very important influencer when choosing the right video conferencing solution. One of the reasons we chose Viewme was because it is very easy for faculty and staff to use, and they don t need to jump through hoops to get it up and running. Viewme enables every user at UMBC their own meeting room and the whole campus can access the solution regardless of their operating system or device. Due to the meeting room scenario, there is no need to schedule meeting times as each user has their own room and can access it at their convenience for either a planned event or an adhoc meeting. Additionally, ezuce went a step further and provided all of UMBC s users with alias meeting room ID s so they are easily remembered and shared with colleagues, and other meeting attendees. Universities have many ways to improve faculty, student and staff interaction and collaboration. At UMBC the key drivers are centered around extending teaching hours, bringing research affiliates from around the state of Maryland together, and increasing productivity of faculty and staff members. Other applications of visual collaboration abound. 6

7 The Solution Telepresence Interoperability Over the years the UMBC community had access to fixed telepresence rooms or faculty could use Skype or some other tool for one to one meetings. The campus challenge for UMBC, and most other universities, is that they needed a tool that could link both the consumerism of desktop, and mobile video conferencing with their existing investments in legacy equipment for their telepresence rooms. Fortunately, Viewme met the criteria as it is interoperable with existing telepresence equipment.

8 Research Collaboration ezuce SRN ezuce Viewme has very prestigious roots. These roots lead back to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and a Research Community with common interest in the world s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider based in Geneva Switzerland. Providing a seamless network for collaboration between these research groups was the start of the software based solution. Some of the needs of the members and the network were to provide an affordable, carrier class, video collaboration solution for this growing global research network to help accelerate the advancement of groundbreaking science projects. Since that time ezuce has brought the next generation of multi-party video and web collaboration solutions to Research Institutions and their colleagues worldwide. Our SRN offering based on Viewme, supports a global community of research projects and users including The Sorbonne (France), DESY (Germany), KEK (Japan),, the University of São Paulo (Brazil), and the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (Australia). This service provides video collaboration service in more than 50 countries in over a dozen languages. 8

9 Unique Features Customizable, flexible, user experience Whatever the requirement Viewme has the ability to meet or exceed your expectations by bringing a number of key value-added capabilities to higher education that can increase adoption of this powerful technology. Key Value-Added Capabilities: Secure concurrent full-screen & windowed desktop sharing - Every meeting participant can share their desktop at the same time, and while sharing can view any number of other desktops. No more ping-ponging of desktops or handing control over between users. Side bar audio conferencing - Viewme s unique Aparté feature allows for multiple sidebar conversations to occur while a larger meeting is taking place. Meeting attendees taking part in an Aparté Conference do not need to miss the rest of the meeting, they can optionally choose to listen to the on-going meeting mixed in with their private conversation. Highly scalable multi-party on-line conferencing - ezuce can easily handle 100+ streams in any meeting. We re not just saying 100+ participants viewing a meeting, that s more than 100 sharing and consuming video. Multi-camera support - The Viewme client allows a single computer with multiple video camera inputs to be able to share all of those cameras at the same time. The client software allows as many as three different cameras to be shared. Flexible deployment - ezuce s service is based on a User Self Hosted Instance (USHI). A USHI is a customer or MSP owned software based video server that can operate on either physical or virtual servers. A USHI can be deployed on premise, or in a cloud or hybrid cloud. This affords unlimited flexibility when designing a solution. Customizable user viewing - Rather than viewing static images or fixed frames, Viewme offers users the ability to participate in visual collaboration using standard or customized views. Enabling the user to view each individual video stream as they prefer makes the experience their own. 9

10 Benefits Built for the enterprise Affordable Flexible Enterprise features at consumer economics allows ezuce to provide the best value. Affordable USER CENTRIC Flexible Ad hoc or scheduled meeting to facilitate peerto-peer, multi-party, and massively large meetings Open Reliable Protects investments in legacy telepresence solutions already in place Open Reliable Secure, available, and scalable to meet the needs of the entire organization Bring Your Own Insight (BYOI) - Viewme provides many benefits not available from other cloud based video services. The user centric Individual meeting room model enables pervasive adoption while increasing team productivity. Viewme encourages the use of BYOD (bring your own device) across the entire organization as it works on multiple devices including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. 10

11 Specifications Video Codes & Resolution Call Signaling & Protocols H.261 up to CIF, H.263 up to 4CIF, H.263+ up to 4CIF, H.264 up to 1080p HD, VP8 up to 1080p Encryption AES (SRTP), TLS Audio Codecs H.323, SIP, TIP, and WebRTC Content Sharing H.239, H.263+ and H.264 Video Recording / Playback G.711 (u-law, A-Law) at 8kHz and 16kHz; L16 at 8kGz, 16kHz, 32kHz, 44.1kHz, 48kHz, Speex at 8kHzz, 16kHz, and 32kHz; G.722 at 16kHz; G at 16kHz; AAC-LD at 48kHz; ilbc at 32kHz; ISAC at 16kHz and 32KHz; Opus at 8kHz, 16kHz and 48kHz Supported Formats Playback Recording/Playback Resolution WMV, MOV, MP4, AVI, MPEG,MPG, FLV, F4V, OGV, OGG, and WEBM Synchronous Native format for unique experience with multiple tiles Up to 1080p Supported Devices Receive all supported devices 11

12 UMBC ezuce Interview Jerry Stabile, Founder, President, and CEO of ezuce has a conversation with Jack Suess, VP and CIO of University of Maryland, Baltimore County to discuss the Internet2 Net+ Viewme offering. Jack shares how they are currently using the Viewme video collaboration solution and sugggests ways to make adoption more pervasive across campus. Watch Now 12

13 About ezuce ezuce is an innovative technology company that provides a visually integrated unified collaboration environment to small and medium enterprises. The company leverages a commercial open source software and service model to deliver industry leading value to its customers and partners. be there ezuce is changing the way people collaborate within the enterprise. By emphasizing visual interaction, the human factor and user centricity, ezuce software and service solutions enable individuals and teams to collaborate on their terms, to be there for the business at the right time, right place, and with the right device. ezuce Origin TM (formerly known as openuc) is an open software platform that supports any end-user device while delivering virtually unlimited scalability, robust functionality and flex-ible cloud/onpremise deployment options. Combined with an opensource economic model, ezuce Origin slashes both operating and capital expenses, to deliver unprecedented value among enterprise-class telephony and collaboration vendors. 13

14 GET IN TOUCH or learn more at ezuce.com ezuce, Inc. 300 Brickstone Square, Suite 104 Andover, MA (978) Try it Free 14