Managed Services Industry Trends

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

BSI’s Automated Tools for Managed Services helps streamline AVISPL’s Video Network Operations Center

Challenge:

AVISPL manages networking, equipment deployment, maintenance, reservation support, helpdesk, hosted video/network infrastructure of its Managed Services Clients. AVISPL monitors the daily operations of multiple customers’ installations through its VNOC or Video Network Operations Center.

The manpower costs involved in managing the VNOC operations was high and there was no automation available whatsoever. Added to this, they did not have the right tools to manage the VNOC operation especially for conference scheduling, monitoring, helpdesk and they did not have the framework or the architecture that could enable tools to be plugged and played. This meant that a lot of time was spent on monitoring customer end points resulting in inefficiency. The only tool they were making use of was a basic scheduling tool called iScheduler, a legacy product. The manual intervention resulted in scalability issues and delays in reacting to situations.

Solution & Technology:

BSI’s Global Delivery Model, Usability Engineering, Microsoft .NET 3.5+ and Service Oriented Architecture, Silverlight 4.0 with backend SQL server.

Benefits:

With the solution provided by BSI, AVISPL was able to monitor its conferences and end-points performance and improve efficiency. There was a 50% reduction in the cost of operations of the VNOC center.

The highly interactive, usable and animated user interface served to attract and retain corporate users while tools for scheduling, helpdesk and monitoring increased the operational efficiency.

The Service Oriented architecture employed enabled seamless integration with 3rd party software such as Exchange and Lotus Notes. Integration time was significantly reduced.

The product was mobile enabled on devices such as iPhone and iPad which allowed AVISPL’s customers to schedule and monitor the conferences on the go. This particular aspect provided the product with a competitive edge and key differentiator in the market place.

Voice of the Customer: <not available yet>

About AVISPL

Tampa-based AVI-SPL is recognized as an innovative leader in the collaboration and AV industry, the result of a 2008 merger between Audio Visual Innovations (AVI) and Signal Perfection Ltd (SPL). Their core value lies in a depth of well-blended expertise, which includes a genuine passion for working with the industry's most advanced collaboration and audiovisual technologies. Their goal is making complex, advanced audio video communications solutions easy to use and effective for their clients.

In a challenging global economy and changing industry landscape, they are firmly dedicated to meeting the unique needs of our customers. They provide a dynamic range of advanced video conferencing, Tele-presence systems and customized solutions as well.

AVISPL’s diverse portfolio features extensive projects in the corporate, education and government sectors, including Fortune 500/Global 1000 boardrooms, military base operation centers and higher education campuses. They have collaborated with architects, designers and end users, leading to the completion of more than 30,000 installations worldwide in 20 countries.

AVI-SPL's unmatched level of expertise includes a partnership with more than 700 of the industry's top manufacturers, a wide depth of highly-skilled and certified technicians, and the reliability of comprehensive support. Through a global network of nearly 40 offices - including international locations in Mexico and Dubai - and more than 1,400 employees, AVI-SPL's strong tradition of collaboration continues.

AVISPL acquired IFormata in Feb 2012 to expand their Managed Services Capability. BSI was the development partner for Iformata in providing a range of product development, enhancement and support services. After the acquisition, BSI continued to provide similar services to AVISPL.

AVISPL provides the following services:

Managed conferencing services for video conferencing and Telepresence

Complete design and installation of all AV systems

Operation center design and installation

Ongoing support services and project management

On-site personnel and supplemental staff

Complete post-sale and installation support

24/7/365 HelpDesk support

Meeting and event support

Sales, rental and repair of all AV equipment

IP integration for infrastructure cabling of voice, data, video and communication systems

Customers of AVISPL

AVISPL’s customers include leading communication companies such as AT&T, Siemens, Polycom,Tandberg, Computer Associates and Zurich Telecom.

Competitors of AVISPL

Some of the competitors of AVISPL in Telepresence managed services are ACT Teleconferencing Inc, AT Conference Inc, AVI Systems Inc, YorkTel, GlowPoint

Managed Services Industry Trends

A new study from ABI Research shows the overall market for global telepresence and videoconferencing managed services is set to reach $1.2 billion in 2016.

Rapid market growth and adoption has opened up a parallel market for managed services due to the network complexities and interoperability issues brought on by technology advances. Interoperability and networking of telepresence equipment poses a major challenge to B2B collaboration, and MVSPs are developing compelling services and solutions to aid companies in managing their technologies.

The need for companies to expand telepresence beyond their firewalls and integrate multi-modal conferencing applications has helped boost the popularity of managed services.

Large telcos have also identified telepresence managed services as an appealing way to cross-sell their network offerings by bundling them with multimedia applications. Added offerings could include telepresence, multipoint HD videoconferencing and real-time content sharing.

Mobile device usage for videoconferencing also requires networks to scale accordingly in addition to offering secure access to users. Yet B2B telepresence exchanges are still in their infancy, with a number of providers having launched services within the past 12 to 18 months.

Problem Faced by iFormata (now AVISPL)

The manpower costs involved in managing the VNOC operations was high and there was no automation available whatsoever. Added to this, they did not have the right tools to manage the VNOC operation especially for conference scheduling, monitoring, helpdesk and integration with 3rd party products. This meant that a lot of time was spent on monitoring customer end points resulting in inefficiencies and response delays. The only tool they were making use of was a basic scheduling tool called ischeduler, which was a legacy product. The manual intervention resulted in operational scalability issues.

Some of the daily tasks of the staff at the VNOC center were:

To monitor whether the network link was up or not and whether the conference end points were responding properly. This was done manually resulting in human errors and inefficient use of time.

To perform the conference setup activities manually and connect all end points.

To start the conference manually and connect all end points.

To monitor packet loss and to ensure that all attendees were present during a conference.

Any problem that arose at the customer’s end had to be tracked manually by raising tickets. Also, the number of tickets in open, pending, closed state was not readily available and they did not have a reporting mechanism for the same.

The call center would receive calls from customers and receive details such as participants, timing, timezone, end point details. Each such request would take 3 to 5 minutes which resulted in longer waiting time for customers

To track ongoing conferences, upcoming conferences were difficult as it was done manually.

The existing helpdesk ticket system was not integrated with conference scheduling and monitoring tools resulting in manual work of linking the tickets to the conference details. The conference billing was done on a standalone basis and was prone to errors and it consumed a lot of time. Also, the billing was not integrated with the conference monitoring tool.

Other challenges

• The customers were not able to view their list of upcoming conferences on the conference reservation website

• There was no automation for viewing the list of endpoints which were encountering problems as well as the conferences which were encountering problems

• The existing tool for helpdesk ticket creation was not integrated with the conference monitoring tool and hence the helpdesk was operated manually

• There was no tool for reporting statistics on the number of conferences held, number of successful/failed conferences, number of cancelled conferences, time spent per conference etc

Solution Provided

The product that was developed to provide a range of tools for the VNOC Operations came to be known as VNOC Symphony.

VNOC Symphony was a product that was jointly developed by BSI and AVISPL. It consists of front office tools such as meeting scheduler, helpdesk, reporting, billing, dashboards, conference monitoring. The front office tools and the core framework were provided by BSI. The back office tools consist of conference producer, conference observer, communicator, maestro which were developed by AVISPL.

Collectively these systems work together as a multi-tenant platform providing immediate and automated services for desktop, group, and immersive tele-presence systems. Complex call flow logic may be modified at any time and applied to individual systems or groups of systems based on administrator changes to a rules engine. The VNOC Symphony platform removes human involvement in video meeting choreography and call management. With more than 450 patent claims across multiple patents, the product portfolio and platform performs every aspect of managing an enterprises fleet of video systems, including call setup, intelligent framing, automated monitoring, event correlation, and call tear down - even for disparate immersive tele-presence systems.

Today people use many diverse tools to manage their schedules: Outlook, Lotus, PDAs, etc. These tools provide a simple window into the Symphony platform, making it immediate and easy to use today's familiar technology to launch impromptu or scheduled audio and video meetings, including Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, Apple's iPhone and iPod, web interfaces, Google's Android, Apple's iPad, IVR interfaces and others. For example, consider the user that schedules a meeting using Microsoft Outlook; based on the start time, VNOC Symphony selects the optimal video bridge, dials each endpoint, adds an audio dial-in if applicable, framing each endpoint. Next, another user may attend the same conference, and if permissions allow, remove a city and add two more - while each site reframes seamlessly. With no VNOC operators involved, all of these requests are driven by users employing their tool of choice, allowing back-office systems to manage the complex operations needed to seamlessly reflect changing user requirements. The VNOC Symphony platform is the world's leading enterprise management system for video and tele-presence deployments.

After a careful evaluation of the requirements and existing tools, BSI recommended the use of Silverlight 4.0 for the UI revamp and a SOA for the integration with third party products such as MS-Exchange, Lotus notes etc. The product was built on n-tier architecture. BSI came up with 6 specific features which are provided as on-demand widgets:

Scheduler: The scheduler allowed the end user to book a conference by providing details such as the participant names, locations, timing of the conference, the time zones of the various participants, end point details. The entire procedure which took 5 to 10 minutes for the call center was reduced to 1 min by building this functionality. This made IFormata’s product extremely competitive in the market and became a defining feature of the VNOC Symphony product.

Digital Airline: Animated application provided a real time, graphical view of the various locations on the world map where completed conferences, ongoing conferences and upcoming conferences were displayed and the various end point connections were depicted in the form of a digital airline connecting these end points. Those end points which were encountering issues would be flagged with a red alert. This enabled the VNOC staff to attend to these issues immediately and resolve it ahead of time.

Helpdesk: The helpdesk application would automatically trigger the creation of a ticket whenever certain end points were facing problems or whenever certain conferences were not functioning properly. It would also provide periodic reports of the status of the tickets in terms of the number of tickets open, closed, pending etc along with a causal analysis of the tickets.

My Conference: The "My Conference" feature on the conference website would enable customers to take part in a conference either as a participant or as a moderator.

Reporting: This feature provides detailed statistics on the various conferences that were held successfully, number of conferences that failed and the ones that were cancelled etc

Billing: This feature provides automated monthly recurring and usage billing statements for their customers

Usability Engineering Solution

BSI came out with a rich, intuitive UI by utilizing Silverlight 4.0 which was simple and user friendly. The BSI Usability Engineering team was instrumental in achieving this.

Animations were provided to graphically indicate the active conferences on a world map. Different colors would be used to indicate the conferences depending on the status of the conferences. Graphical lines would be used to connect endpoints across the world map which would indicate the ongoing conferences and their locations. The end customer usability experience was greatly enhanced through high quality graphics. The entire GUI was designed to provide a MACBOOK feel to the users since majority of AVISPL’s customers were Mac users. This provided similar navigational experience as that of Mac book in handling widgets

Embracing Distributed Agile

The need for faster software development cycles and hence faster time to market necessitated the change from the traditional model of software development to Distributed Agile methodology. This change was effected in latter half of 2009. Separate SCRUM meetings were held daily for the different component teams, with the database and the testing teams being common to all teams. The SCRUM masters and the rest of the project leadership from BSIL ensured that there was no duplication of effort between teams, and that everyone at the distributed locations was on the same page. Sprint durations were 4 weeks for the first 6 months and changed to 3 weeks for the next 4 months before transitioning to 1 week iterations to keep pace with very strong market needs. Both AVISPL and BSI adopted tools that maximized visibility of project artefacts and project status to all stakeholders.

In the third quarter of 2011, the team architecture was changed from separate component based teams to just two teams organized as per business needs, and consisting of composite (co-located& distributed) resources. Both teams were working on user stories / features identified and articulated by the Product Owners. The SCRUM process was adapted into a KANBAN SCRUM process in alignment with lean process requirements, and a new emphasis on actively supporting production builds from distributed locations

In early 2012, the two teams were further merged into one SCRUM team in keeping with the business objectives after iFormata’s acquisition by AVI-SPL.

Thus, BSI helped the client to embrace agile methods for software development thus making AVISPL competitive in the market.

IFormata began the project with a set of requirements which kept evolving over a period of time. The waterfall model would have greatly curtailed the freedom with which IFormata could strategize their requirements as per market needs. BSI recommended the use of Agile model which allowed both the teams to deliver in shorter durations while reducing documentation and also provided IFormata, the ability to revisit the entire software development cycle from time to time to incorporate newer requirements while reducing costs with distributed teams. The distributed teams also helped the teams to have smaller and more modular targets and also helped to reduce time to market by embracing the global delivery model. The distributed agile model was continuously refined to meet the dynamic requirements of IFormata.

Other Value-Adds

Besides these product improvements, BSIL also helped AVISPL to integrate its product with MS Exchange by building necessary adaptors using exchange features to talk to VNOC Symphony framework. This was one of the critical requirements for AVISPL since some of its competitors were in the process of implementing this feature in their products. By introducing this feature, AVISPL was able to compete better in the market which enabled AVISPL to acquire large customers throughout the world. The integration with MS Exchange allowed the business users to be able make a reservation, modify/cancel the reservation on MS Exchange thus obviating the need for them to go to the website to perform those functions. Majority of the business users today are embracing mobility in a big way and they would like to perform activities on the move. According to the results of a survey conducted by AVISPL, majority of its customers were MACBOOK users. Based on this, AVISPL foresaw the need for the business users to be able to access the product on IPAD and IPHONE.

BSI understood the strategic needs of AVISPL, with deep understanding of VNOC Symphony framework, BSI provided a prototype of VNOC Symphony iPad client. AVISPL was excited about the application and its animation, AVISPL chose BSI to implement the product on the IPAD & IPHONE platforms.

BSI provided e user friendly intuitive and animated mobile UI, developed the backend enterprise architecture and integrated this to the front end native application. This provided AVISPL users a feature rich and enhanced user experience mobile application on iOS platform.

BSI played a key role in releasing multiple versions of the mobile application. In fact these versions got approved by app store within few minutes which highlights BSI mobility capabilities. This section can be expanded upon in detail.

BSI-AVISPL Engagement Timeline

Thus BSI provided a range of services to AVISPL such as UI Engineering, Technology Consulting, Mobility Enabled Services, Production Database Support and Maintenance in order to overcome the challenges faced by AVISPL.

Apart from this, BSI went beyond technology consulting to offer business consulting services especially in pre-sales. BSI assisted AVISPL in the launch of the product and was involved in product demos. As stated earlier, BSI was responsible for providing usability engineering and technology consulting services. When the VNOC Symphony product was in the development phase, AVISPL wanted to demonstrate the product to its existing customers. However, the AVISPL pre-sales and the sales team were not familiar initially with the product flow and hence BSI was called upon to give the product demo to AVISPL’s prospective customers. BSI demonstrated the Front end developed using Silverlight as well as the Exchange Integration functionality.

BSI’s initial business engagement was with iFormata. Some of the software that BSI developed for iFormata made its services and offerings extremely competitive in the market which could have been one of the reasons for AVISPL’s acquisition of iFormata.

After AVISPL acquired iFormata, the CEO of AVISPL John Zettel remarked "In 2009 we set forth on an initiative to grow our video communications business. In 2011 we succeeded in growing video related revenue to over $200 million and video is now included in over 50 percent of the projects we do,With that growth, we recognized the importance of expanding our capabilities in the video services we provide our customers. Acquiring Iformata shows our commitment to expanding our video communications strategy with a strong managed services offering."

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In the recent Customer Satisfaction Survey, AVISPL has rated BSI 10/10.