Welcome everybody to episode number 35 of Polycom OnDemand. I am your host Scott Whitney. On today’s show, we are going to concentrate on the issues surrounding the management of a complex Video Conferencing environment.
Hello again everybody and welcome to Polycom OnDemand, the show that demonstrates how collaboration technology can make your life much, much easier. We can be reached on the Web at PolycomOnDemand.com and our email address is podcast@polycom.com. You can use that email to send us comments or to submit questions for us to answer on subsequent shows.
For a first person look into many of the issues facing customers trying to manage a complicated Video Conferencing environment along with the talk about what can be done to make things easier, I am pleased to be joined on the phone by Director of Worldwide Service Marketing Charlie Wiseman. Charlie, welcome back to Polycom OnDemand.
Thank you, Scott. Glad to be back.
That’s great to have you, Charlie. Hey, Charlie, why don’t we start by having you help me understand some of the problems I might be faced with when it comes to management of a complex Video Conferencing environment?
Okay. It basically comes down to the problems falling into several areas. So let’s first take the infrastructure or the core network and the ability to be able to manage that especially when you have diverse locations. So if you are spread out, you have multiple locations, you have different people covering those locations, how do you manage that and totally get your arms around that. When you add the complexity of the telephony deployment on top of that, then it really gets hard to manage the whole infrastructure. And when you have to look at how are some of the ways in which you can do that and you look across the multiple people that you use, you now have the issues with training, the ability to keep those people up to date so that they can manage everything on the different technologies that are changing on three or six month technology cycles.
And the last piece that really adds to complexity is you could be looking at 40 or more endpoints, at least one or two MCU units and now you have added in the complexity of all of this equipment. So it gets very, very difficult for someone to try to keep their arms around this.
And I would expect as the complexity grows, there will be other people issues as well.
Exactly. And you don’t only have the learning curve for the support people and your local onsite people, but you also have the difficultly that comes with the differences in location, often times geographical differences so you may have some language problems and barriers that you need to deal with as well as time barriers. So when you put all of those into the mix and you are trying to manage your customer satisfaction levels, and provide them with the most available uptime and that is the availability of their conferencing and collaboration equipment, it’s hard to do in today’s market.
Well, is there a typical type of customer who would be dealing with these issues?
To be continued…
