Like everyone else I tend to take success stories and case studies with a grain of salt. Nevertheless I wanted to share with you a business case I recently heard of from Itay Reiner, one of the Product Managers here in RADVISION. You’ll understand why in a minute.

Here Comes the Success Story…

And the story goes like this: an SMB with more than 400 employees and offices that span the US (a few branches), Europe (France, the UK and more), APAC (China, Korea, Japan and more) has deployed RADVISION’s video conferencing infrastructure massively in the organization.

Just for an idea of proportions: I am talking about 18 SCOPIA MCUs (conferencing bridges), both the Elite and the Classic, distributed in the organization; 10 Gatekeepers; 8 Gateways; 4 SCOPIA Desktop servers; 3 PathFinder servers. All of this, of course, to support more than a 100 desktop endpoints (VC240 and their likes), more than 30 room systems, and our software client, the SCOPIA Desktop, installed for every user.

When I am talking about a massive deployment I am also talking about a very high usage rate – around 9000 video calls, and more than 3400 video meetings per month – that’s around 300 video calls and 100 video conferences a day. The stats are pretty amazing, and show how successful the deployment is, and how natural video calling becomes once it is successfully deployed.

OK, and here comes the bottom line,  the reason this is a success story, and not just a story: all of this is managed from a single office, using a single management system (our iView management suite), by a single administrator.

Sounds fantastic, right?   Too good to be true?!   Well, I might have been skeptical myself if it wasn’t that I actually know the organization Itay is talking about. In fact, I work for it.

Eating Our Own Dog Food

In one of my early posts I’ve written how we at RADVISION implement what we preach, but this vivid example that Itay gave me really sounded significant to me (well, significant enough for me to share it with you). And the reason is that it breaks a few myths that I’ve heard from various people during the last few years:

• Massive deployment of video conferencing is “a big headache” and has to be maintained by a big, dedicated team
• People will not use video calling/conferencing, even if they have it at their disposal
• Video conferencing equipment is not mature yet, not stable yet, not fitting for mass deployment yet.

Well, video conferencing can be deployed, heavily used and centrally managed with just a few good men (actually one good woman in our case). This is assuming that you have chosen the right infrastructure and the right architecture for the job in the first place.

So is this a success story? A business case? I don’t know. But I do hope you understand now why I told you the story, and why I was enthusiastic when Itay told it to me.

Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t surprised or anything, but I was very pleased. If you’re reading this blog for a while, this shouldn’t come as a surprise for you either. Just another reason to share the success.