Overview
As a constituent of the FTSE 100 and a Multinational Financial Institution, this client has relied on videoconferencing for many years for its thousands of employees spanning the globe. It was an integral part of their internal communications and maintaining and growing client relationships.
Pre-COVID, client meetings primarily took place in-person or using the Cisco meeting room systems they had invested in over the years. In addition, there were a few Poly endpoints in some smaller satellite offices. From a remote user perspective and for regular live events, Skype for business was the primary video platform.
Challenges
In this firm, video challenges started to arise during the COVID era where employees were mandated to work from home and clients were not “in the office”. Therefore, video became more crucial than ever. Users were dialing clients from their home office, their kitchen table, their spare bedroom, and garden office – whatever was necessary for business continuity and client satisfaction. Slowly, when safe to do so, they started to return to the office in waves, and soon they had the “hybrid working” scenario.
By this time, the firm was already using Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, WebEx, and Zoom for different reasons with different clients.
Once they partially returned to the office, users had become accustomed to using one, if not more of the 4 platforms mentioned above and so they had an important decision to make. They established a “working group” and hosted several internal meetings on this topic, about choosing the right path and platform for them. It was decided to conduct a survey to gather the thoughts of the users.
Solution & Deployment
Synergy SKY solved the two main challenges for the multinational financial institution that they were previously struggling with – cross-platform interoperability and making the user experience as simple and as consistent as possible.
With the easy deployment of Synergy SKY, it was made possible to connect to anyone on any platform from their meeting rooms. The solution was designed to cater to individual meeting spaces, whether it be 4 or 24 people with an all-around superb experience.
Additionally, it also helped them achieve the following:
- Provide an easy and consistent way to schedule or forward an invite to a meeting room and JOIN video calls from the Cisco endpoint with the famous “big green join button” irrespective of where the call is hosted; Teams, Zoom, Webex, Internal or external.
- Provide a secure and reliable way to scrape calendar invites to establish where invites are coming from to ensure the relevant interoperability could be leveraged to join the call on the chosen platform.
- Provide IT Operations with a control dashboard providing visibility of all video calls in and out of meeting rooms to be able to offer support for those users where needed.
- Provide reporting and analytics to help them better understand the ever-changing landscape, which technologies are being used, which calls are using interoperability, how often meeting rooms are being used, by how many users, and much more.
- To de-book meeting rooms when users are “no shows” for meetings.
- Continue to allow users to accept calls on Zoom, Teams, WebEx, BlueJeans, Skype, Google, GoTo Meeting, and others from a variety of clients.
- Leverage the relevant levels of interoperability to ensure a call connection is possible, whether that be Collaboration Room Connector license for a Zoom call, CVI for a Teams call, or Google gateway for a Google Meet call. The users do not need to know how it works – just that it does.
Result
This same client can now join any Microsoft Teams call from their SIP endpoints (in this case, Cisco), any tenant, anywhere in the world even when Cloud Video Interop (CVI) is not available. Synergy SKY continues to cater to problems as they arise in the video market and clients can continue to take advantage of new features as they are developed into the solution.
