ConNetSult has extensive experience with deploying and managing global Audio and Web conferencing:
Audio Conferencing
Compared various in-house conference bridge solutions vs. a carrier solution
- Result: Carrier solution does not need capacity management vs. in-house solution needs to be constantly monitored and managed by in-house staff (in-house costs – Monitoring tools, network and staff)
- An in-house solution requires continued capital requests to manage growth and refresh of hardware. (in-house costs – Hardware and maintenance)
- Network capacity also needs to be manage (in-house costs – voice capacity for all callers to reach equipment from multiple global locations)
- Carrier provides operator attended calls. Will in-house staff to support operator attended calls or will these calls still be handled by the carrier?
- If the answer is in-house staff, staff costs will increase.
- If the answer is that the carrier will handle operator attended calls, adoption of in-house solution will be hampered.
- If the in-house conferencing bridge is reaches capacity or goes down, what is the contingency for this? In many cases, businesses will retain the carrier to provide conferencing as a backup. However, if employees have a bad experience with the in-house solution, they tend to migrate away from the in-house bridging solution.
- Will the in-house solution include plans to purchase additional equipment to make the system redundant and operate in diverse data centers? If so, costs will increase for the in-house solution.
- If your enterprise establishes an Ethernet connection into the carrier’s bridge, costs will actually be lower than with the installation of an in-house solution.
- How much will the data network be expanded to support the call volume?
- What do you calculate your cost per minute to be with the new system? I.e. cost of the system (hardware amortization + annual maintenance + staffing)/ number of minutes used per year).
- Note: it is our experience that running an in-house conference bridge has many challenges. 100% adoption is generally not the end result.
Web Conferencing
Deployed MS Live Meeting and Adobe Web Conferencing tools globally based upon corporate requirements
- Saved $400,000 over previous year spend by unifying web conferencing tool for global utilization
