24-Hour Bandwidth Profile - Aggregate for All MCUs
So . . . your videoconferencing deployment has been growing. Management is taking notice. People are starting to actually depend on the service. But, they’re also expecting more and more from you and your team. Are these the trends in your organization? If the following scenarios sound familiar, an advanced analytics and reporting solution may be an option you’ll want to consider:
- Your customers need business-related metrics – now. An executive in your organization is concerned about a lack of management coordination between regions. To get a feel for how well the teams are working together, she has just requested information on last month’s volume of videoconferences between your US and European Headquarters offices. You asked for two weeks to get this information to her. She said, “I need it this afternoon, don’t bother.”
- You need to help others plan. Facilities managers across the organization have expressed interest in knowing how much their conference rooms are being used for telepresence meetings. They are trying to plan their capital budgets for the coming year. Do they need to equip more rooms with telepresence capabilities?
- Troubleshooting service quality issues is getting tougher. Your technical staff needs more detailed information to resolve a persistent videoconferencing service quality issue in the Western Region office. They complain that the analytical tools provided by the equipment vendors just don’t allow them to get enough good information. And, they really need to explore historical information going back more than 90 days or so. You don’t have the time and resources to have someone spend days sifting through system event logs.
- You need to control expenses. You just learned that you will have to maintain a flat expense budget for the company’s videoconferencing service into next year – but you know that demand for services will probably increase by 25% or more. How can you determine where that increase in demand is coming from? Where can you get good resource utilization information, so you can shift resources to meet the growing need while keeping the budget under control?
- Management wants higher levels of visibility and accountability. You are now ‘on the hook’ to meet SLA targets. You need to start reporting service performance metrics. But, how are you going to measure performance? How are you going to communicate performance against SLA metrics to management and the business units? You can’t possibly add the burden of generating monthly reports to the list of things your oh-so-thinly-spread staff already has to do every day. You are seriously considering asking for more staff just to get this new reporting job done.
- You need quick and easy access to solid decision support data. You are assembling your budget for the coming year. You’ve included new infrastructure components (more MCU ports) to support increasing demand in Europe. You know that the new Southern Region campus is going to need a dedicated support team to ensure that service quality expectations will be met. But, you know what’s coming – pushback, requests for better validation of your budget requests. You only have so much time to get this plan together, but you are are finding it difficult to produce the decision support data needed to justify the proposed investments and address those inevitable questions from management.
- Network planning is becoming a critical issue. Your delivery partners over in the Network Infrastructure organization have just told you about some serious service quality issues in the Chicago office. They’re convinced that the volume of network traffic generated by your Chicago videoconferencing systems is clearly the issue. They’ve asked you to put a cap on usage in Chicago. But, you are equally convinced that videoconferencing usage is probably not high enough to be the sole cause of the problem. Where are you going to get the 24-hour network bandwidth usage profile data you need to respond and help develop the right plan for mitigation of the issue?
- You want to stay ahead; be proactive, not reactive. It seems that every day, the number of decisions you are asked to make is increasing. People are no longer satisfied with best guesses and responses like, “We’ll need a couple of weeks to investigate, and we’ll get back to you.” The pace-of-business is demanding that you and your team make better and faster decisions. You’re wondering if you can even keep up, never mind staying ahead . . .
DesigNET’s SMART Analytics and Reporting Platform is all about helping videoconferencing service managers stay on top of their services. Check out how Adobe Systems has been able to handle rapid service growth by making SMART reports an integral part of daily service management.
