Agriculture Multinational Compares Video Conferencing Solutions

Challenge

A multinational agricultural company had acquired video conferencing equipment from a number of vendors over the years. What they needed going forward was a single solution that supported their usability and scaling requirements and that was easy to set up and maintain.

The challenge for the company, common to many businesses, was it'd be a logistical and financial nightmare to procure enough equipment to test competing solutions at scale.

With knowledge of our Advanced Technology Center (ATC) and its extensive testing capabilities, the company approached WWT to build out a proof of concept. By leveraging the product comparison capabilities of the ATC ecosystem, the company could evaluate different video system designs and configurations side by side.

In short, they needed our help to accelerate the determination regarding which system was best suited for their environment.

Solution

WWT quickly spun up a number of video conferencing system configurations, including on-site and cloud-based management strategies, using hardware owned by the customer as well as video hardware and back-end capabilities native to the ATC. Drawing on the ATC's built-in capabilities not only allowed us to provide these environments extremely quickly, but it saved the customer from having to procure all the equipment itself.

The primary video hardware solutions under consideration were from Poly and Cisco, with the customer wanting to explore infrastructure and software solutions from Cisco and Microsoft.

One of the big questions they had was how their existing Poly hardware would integrate with a software solution from another provider. Given WWT's experience integrating systems and hardware of all stripes, we were able to show them how their equipment could be used in any number of configurations, such as internal video conferencing meeting with on-premise infrastructure, external video conferencing meeting with a cloud-based solution (room only), or external video conferencing meeting with a connected meeting room. We then walked them through any trade-offs or challenges they might encounter running each configuration with different vendor systems.

Once the materials and systems were set up, we helped the customer test and configure each system for a number of custom requirements around usability, performance, ease of deployment and system interoperability.

Because they wanted to test multiple kinds of video cameras connecting to the same meeting at once, we opened the entirety of the ATC to them for testing, including systems and connected conference rooms that we use ourselves at our headquarters in St. Louis.

Conclusion

After extensive testing and exploration, the customer was in a position to select a video technology that met all of their usability, performance, deployment and interoperability requirements. They ultimately decided to go with a Cisco video conferencing solution.

WWT's proof of concept displayed our capability to quickly spin up environments and highlighted the value of our standing test labs. Through the ATC, we were able to help the customer achieve several significant business outcomes:

1. Cost Savings: By using existing ATC capabilities, the customer significantly reduced the costs of procuring and testing the hardware and software of competing solutions. They also saved on the back end by selecting an integrated and consolidated video conferencing system.
2. Quality Assurance: We showed the customer how to integrate their existing equipment and selected solution, and we tested the integrated solution to ensure it met their requirements before it was implemented in their environment.
3. Confidence: Getting hands-on experience with various configurations, hardware systems and platforms gave the customer confidence that their chosen conferencing solution would meet their requirements going forward.