Jan Ruzicka from CESNET in the Czech Republic and Christian Meyer from DFN in Germany share their experience with the web and videoconferencing solutions acquired via the tender jointly run by GÉANT and NORDUnet .
“At CESNET we needed to improve and enlarge the capacity of our current infrastructure. We felt the best way to do this was to aggregate demand. Then interface with solution providers to get better pricing terms. The new Kinley licenses and plan gives us more flexible capacity planning that runs on commodity hardware. We can independently upgrade and enlarge our hardware platform with lower investment costs than for MCUs. The Framework licensing plan also opens new ways to access the service, like WebRTC and Skype4Business. This simplifies and expands the reach of our system for end users. By changing our cost structure from capital investment to an operational budget model, we know our fixed annual fees. This helps us to better plan and deploy platform revisions in the future.”
“DFN needed to simplify and improve our videoconferencing platform and combine it with web conferencing functionality. We had hardware that was end-of-life and issues with a proprietary web conferencing tool. So we were in the market for a fresh approach. Pexip, distributed by Kinley, is a modern platform that offers new ways to access the services, such as WebRTC and Skype. Scaling is much more flexible and cost-effective, since we merely buy licenses and run the software on commodity servers. We expect to roll out the new service in June 2018 and to add live streaming and recording with on demand streaming soon afterwards. We would not have been able to offer that before.”