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Since February 2015, GEANT Association Product Management Team (GAPMT) have been working methodically through the necessary steps to deliver such a service to Switch, starting with discussions with Vidyo and CERN on the principle of a tri-party agreement for the supply of a managed Videoconferencing service, using Vidyo licenses hosted on CERN infrastructure.
Survey introduction
“Make the adoption of useful WebRTC services easier by adding them to the GÉANT Cloud Catalogue, with framework agreements where opportune. In particular, make one or more easy to use WebRTC desktop video conferencing services available to all European R&E users through the GÉANT clouds service catalogue, soonest.”
The GÉANT project’s new “Application and Service Delivery Development” team is going to actively look into video conferencing solutions – primarily those supporting the WebRTC protocol and native browser clients – either offered by the NREN community or by commercial partners, out of their own cloud infrastructure or hosted in third-party clouds.
Following a request from the Swiss NREN (SWITCH) to act as the intermediary/reseller for the same video conferencing service that CERN operates for its user community using the Vidyo product, GÉANT have been working with CERN and Vidyo to construct an integrated service bundle for SWITCH where:
- Vidyo provides the video conferencing technology and software.
- CERN provides hosting in their highly reliable cloud infrastructure.
- GÉANT manages end-user licenses, accounts, billing and provides second line support.
- Can scale to multiple thousand concurrent users.
- Up to hundreds of participant in one meeting.
- Licenses are needed for the maximum number of concurrent users and not all the individual users.
- Multi device support: iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, room systems.
- Multi protocols and systems support: WebRTC, H.264svc, SIP, H.323, Skype for Business.
The offering
Before deciding to make this specific service bundle more widely available to the NREN community via the GÉANT Cloud Catalogue, we need to understand the likely demand from NRENs to sign up for this particular deal.
Note that, although CERN offered to host the service in their cloud infrastructure, we are also looking into other models where NRENs or GÉANT can provide hosting for Vidyo.
We would appreciate your answers to the following 6 questions about NRENs interest to provide their users with a video conference service, especially this particular Vidyo/CERN/GÉANT deal.
Survey outcome
We have received 13 14 NREN answers so far; 10 from the TF-WebRTC community participants and 3 4 from outside.
List of NRENs who answered:
Belnet, DFN, RENAM, MREN, GARR, LITNET, PSNC, NIIF, HEAnet, ARNES, NORDUnet, UNINETT, JISC, FCT/FCCN.
Answers:
There is a clear trend of migrating from traditional H.323/SIP hardware based VC systems to Web-based RTC software solutions.
The "Other" category mostly represents the cases where the traditional and the new service types co-exist and/or interoperate.
Results:
1) Most of the NRENs are willing and able to host vc services video conferencing services (any type) in their own infrastructure (85.5%)
2) 7%).
This does not necessarily mean that any hosted solution would not be interesting for them, this is just the fact that they are technically capable.
Some NRENs would be happy to take vc video conferencing services from other partner NRENs (and presumably from GÉANT and/or other community members), others not.
No extremes thoughin this case, the community is pretty much divided into two almost equal groups. (54% 57% more likely, 46% 43% less likely). The usual build vs. buy division is reflected here.
3) Asking about the specific Vidyo/CERN/GÉANT service, it is "less likely" or "no" that NRENs would take it. (6171.5%4%).
2 answered answers are definitely not and 3 4 answers are more likely. The detailed analysis below attempts to explain the main reasons behind the results.
Detailed analysis
1) Looking more into the details, it turns out that LITNET, HEAnet, JISC and NIIF already have Vidyo services. HEAnet and JISC are sharing the same Vscene/Vidyo service of JISC.
- What I learned off-line is that HEAnet would be interested in comparing the JISC Vscene/Vidyo offer with the Vidyo/CERN/GÉANT offer.
- Both NIIF and JISC would be interested in integrating their existing Vidyo services with a third-party service but only for offloading peek demands from their own service to the other. Kinda back-up/extension if you like.
2) There were only 3 NRENs being more positive about the Vidyo/CERN/GÉANT deal specifying their needs:
- RENAM: 15 institutions - 2,500 users
- LITNET: 20 institutions - 10,000 users
- HEAnet: 30 institutions - 10,000 users
These numbers clearly show that the current deal is not scalable without tendering procurement!
Counting with 10:1 ratio (CERN info) this demand represents 2250 Vidyo licenses per year, counting with 50:1 ratio (Internet2 info) this is 450 licenses per year.
Remember we can only buy about 500 licenses without procurement and SWITCH already blocks 50 and potentially an extra 50 soon.
3) I also got some informal feedback on pricing. Most of the people who I talked to told me that 1000 EUR/license/year is expensive!
A realistic price that some of them could imagine would be about 500-600 EUR/license/year in case of a hosted solution. This is understandable as most of them would only use it for back-up/extension purposes.
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