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Kollective IQ: The Smartest ECDN Analytics Platform Just Got Smarter

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When it comes to enterprise content delivery network (ECDN) analytics, not all platforms are created equal. Some only surface high-level insights; others limit the data you have access to; many make it difficult to find the metrics that matter. Not Kollective IQ . We provide the deepest and most user-friendly insights into enterprise video streaming and software delivery on the market.

Let’s walk through a few of the reporting features that make Kollective IQ a cut above the rest.

Custom Dashboards, Reports & Visualizations

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Kollective IQ is designed with intuitive, out-of-the-box user workflows that make it easy for you to find the information that is most important to your role, whether you’re a communications professional, SCCM manager, network administrator or event producer. But the insights don’t stop there – Kollective IQ makes it simple to create custom dashboards, reports and visualizations.

  • Need to report on content deliveries in Hong Kong to your CTO?
  • Does your CEO like to know the metrics tied to their latest All Hands broadcast?
  • Is it imperative you receive immediate insight into security patch deployments?

Kollective IQ makes all your reporting needs possible – you can even deliver locality-specific analytics.

Locality-Specific Analytics

First things first: let’s define what a locality is and why it matters in the context of ECDN analytics.

The dictionary definition of a locality is “the position or site of something.” At Kollective, we define it as a method for managing traffic within an existing network. We do this by controlling peering during a live or on-demand event in accordance with the physical location of machines, regardless of whether they operate off an internal or external IP address.

Here’s an example of how it can work.

Let’s say you’re a network administrator in a company with eight global offices, two of which are in Central America and experience regular bandwidth throttling. Rather than exceed network capacity and compromise business critical applications, you can configure your ECDN to prioritize lean content deliveries by capping playback bitrate in those offices.

With Kollective IQ, you can create custom reports for each locality and share the information collected by the system, providing your teams with the data they need, when they need it.

Insights to Your Inbox: Threshold-Based Alerting

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With so much going on and so many tasks to manage, it can be hard to track the progress of your goals. Not anymore. With Kollective IQ, you can easily set up and automate alerts to let you and your colleagues know when certain KPI thresholds have been reached.

  • Want to be alerted when you achieve an excellent Quality of Experience (QoE) score during a monthly CEO Town Hall meeting?
  • Need to know when you are saving 90% or more of bandwidth when releasing the latest Windows 10 update?
  • Want an update when your broadcast event has reached all 2,000 of your first-line healthcare employees?

Setting up alerts in Kollective IQ is easy and gets you the data you need, when you need it.

Easily Import Data from Kollective IQ into Power BI

As cloud-based applications become more popular throughout the enterprise, controlling SaaS sprawl has become a common conversation among IT teams – especially when it comes to reporting and data silos. At Kollective, we recognize how important it is for our technology to play nicely with business intelligence platforms like Microsoft’s Power BI and we’ve made it easier than ever to push data into third-party systems.

In less than five minutes, you can automate reporting from Kollective IQ into Power BI using Webhook or Amazon S3.

Trial Kollective IQ

Ready to see Kollective IQ in action? Signing up is easy. It only takes six clicks – and it’s FREE. Kollective IQ is included in every ECDN trial.

The post Kollective IQ: The Smartest ECDN Analytics Platform Just Got Smarter appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Network Capacity Planning for Live Video

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With large numbers of employees still working from home, many enterprises are adopting a video-based culture to aid in corporate communications. What is often missed however is the impact live video can have on your network. This is where network capacity planning comes in.

Network capacity planning helps network administrators understand a network’s shortcomings. Typically, it involves gathering data around:

  • Network traffic
  • Traffic type
  • Utilization rate
  • Infrastructure capacity

The purpose of network capacity planning in regard to video is to find out if your network can handle the demand for live and on-demand streaming.

In the last few months, we’ve heard a few justifications for why some organizations have avoided network capacity planning prior to running live events.

“We have plenty of bandwidth. We don’t even have half of our employees back in the office yet.”

“Video will be easy. We’re running a skeleton crew.”

Unfortunately, those arguments don’t hold up in the new normal. Here’s a real-world example from a Kollective customer that explains why.

10% of Employees Can Consume 70% of Network Capacity

A leading agricultural organization recently broadcast a virtual Town Hall Meeting to its globally distributed workforce of 45,000 using a top webcasting platform. Their corporate headquarters, normally alive with more than 5,000 employees, had less than 10% of its staff in office on the day of the event.

With so few employees onsite at HQ, the IT team was confident they could live stream the Town Hall without activating an enterprise content delivery network (ECDN) to optimize bandwidth consumption.

The result? Seventy percent of HQ’s total network capacity was consumed by less than 10% of the workforce.

Given the physical distancing measures required in the workplace, each of those 500 employees participated in the Town Hall from their own computer, pulling the video stream directly from the source instead of gathering to watch in the HQ auditorium. This put immense strain on the network.

If you do the math, that means their network would not be able to support even 15% of employees streaming video from HQ.

What happens when the bulk of employees return to the office?

The Weight of Synchronous Video

The goal for every organization shifting to a video-based culture is to deliver a high-quality viewing experience that is inclusive to all employees, regardless of location, bandwidth or device. Although our customer may have network capacity at Corporate HQ, they also need to address remote office and branch locations that are the most likely to struggle with scaling live and on-demand video.

For context, live events created in Microsoft Stream get a fixed encoding profile:

  • 720p – 3.5 mbps
  • 540p – 2.2 mbps
  • 396p – 1.4 mbps
  • 288p – 850 kbps
  • 216p – 550 kbps
  • 192p – 200 kbps

What’s important to note is that video playback is not a static number and will change according to:

  • The video’s original resolution, bitrate and content
  • A user’s available bandwidth
  • Size of the player

You can estimate the impact video will have on your network by measuring and sampling the bandwidth of the content typically produced by your organization. Extrapolate that out across the total number of employees likely to view said content, and you can see how quickly the bandwidth required to stream video at scale adds up.

How an ECDN Optimizes Bandwidth Consumption

The simplest way to offset live video bandwidth consumption is with an ECDN. Kollective’s ECDN uses WebRTC technology to create a peering mesh between employees in a shared office location. Rather than everyone pulling content directly from the cloud and overwhelming your WAN (wide area network), a single peer gains access to the video and shares it with those nearby.

As you can see, a network without an ECDN is quickly overwhelmed by video – first by live playback and then by employees viewing the event on demand. This can have a dramatic impact not only on the viewing experience but also for business-critical applications that rely on the same network.

Network capacity spike

With an ECDN those network spikes are eliminated, which means you can be confident live video will not take down your network and the end user will have a high-quality viewing experience.

Small network capacity spike

See How Peering Works

Take the work out of network capacity planning with Kollective’s ECDN. Try our demo today to see how we can help you deliver 100% of video broadcasts at 1% the bandwidth.

The post Network Capacity Planning for Live Video appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Maximize Microsoft Teams ROI with Kollective Technology

CMMA Blog

Gartner predicted in May that IT spending will plummet 8% in 2020 as CIOs slash budgets in response to the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. But that doesn’t mean organizations will abandon their digital transformation initiatives altogether. Quite the opposite. Gartner predicts money spent on cloud services will increase 19%. That’s because, according to chief forecaster John-David Lovelock, “Companies have to be more digital than they had planned to be.” Rather than investing in new hardware or infrastructure upgrades, they’ll be looking to add software that improves efficiency of their existing technologies, maximizing the return on investment (ROI).

Kollective’s enterprise content delivery network (ECDN) for Microsoft Teams is a great example of this. Many businesses have shifted their communication strategies and are using collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams to share important messages across their organizations via video. While Teams is ideal for one-to-many meetings, broadcasting live and on-demand video to thousands of employees without the help of a complimentary technology like Kollective ECDN can easily throttle your network and cause buffering, poor user experience or even event failure.

Here’s why seamless communications are important and how they can impact your Microsoft Teams ROI.

Poor Communications Cost You More

According to “The Cost of Poor Communications” study, “a survey of 400 companies with 100,000 employees each cited an average loss per company of $62.4 million per year because of inadequate communication to and between employees.” Conversely, Best Buy found that higher employee engagement scores led to better financial performance. For every 0.1 percentage point employee engagement increased, individual stores saw a $100,000 uptick in annual operating income.

Unfortunately, the latest research from Gallup found that U.S. employee engagement suffered its most significant drop since 2000 with only 31% of employees feeling actively engaged in June versus 38% in May. Although Gallup attributes much of the decline to economic, public health and social concerns, workplace communications have also played a role. They stated that “employers have taken their focus off – or have been unclear in – their plans, as businesses within many states began to reopen in June.”

Improve Employee Engagement with Video Communications

The Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) suggests one of the best ways to increase engagement is to supply employees with the right tools for the job. Don MacPherson, a partner in the employee engagement practice at Aon in Minneapolis said, “Companies with employees who have both the psychological investment in their jobs and the resources to adapt to a changing world are better positioned to survive disruptive market conditions.”

When it comes to communication, Microsoft Teams is a premier enterprise video collaboration tool that can be used to broadcast corporate messages and facilitate team meetings or one-on-one conversations. By equipping all members of your organization with Teams, you make it easier to stay engaged and thus, more productive.

The caveat is that your network must have the bandwidth to reliably and securely scale video across the enterprise. Disruptions to service and poor-quality audio or video can lead to system mistrust, making it difficult to achieve full adoption.

Assessing network readiness is a key component when preparing to scale Microsoft Teams – especially with physical distancing measures in place that will require employees to stream more videos from their desks as opposed to conference rooms or auditoriums. The bandwidth you had before COVID may not be enough to accommodate the new normal.

Why Kollective ECDN for Microsoft Teams?

Upgrading your network with new hardware or infrastructure is expensive and resource dependent. And, it doesn’t align with the directive to embrace digital transformation. Kollective ECDN for Microsoft Teams is the right solution to improve employee engagement. It is an innovative cloud-based solution that layers on top of your existing network and uses browser-based peering technology to deliver broadcast-quality video to all employees without impacting business critical applications.

If your organization has already invested in Microsoft 365, you have access to Teams and Stream today – even if you aren’t actively using them. Rather than paying for a secondary collaboration tool or spendy event production services, you can leverage Teams Live Events in combination with Kollective ECDN to engage employees and generate a greater return on your M365 investment.

Read How Kollective is Being Used in Microsoft Technology and Experience Centers Worldwide

Kollective ECDN is so effective, even Microsoft uses it to demonstrate the scalability of Teams and Stream in its Technology and Experience Centers worldwide.

“At Experience Center Asia, through enabling the use of Kollective Technology for Microsoft Teams live events, we not only showcase our commitment to partners and innovation, we also clearly demonstrate to the market how the Future of Work may look like,” said Microsoft’s Rebecca Hick, Director of Experience Center Asia.

Read more in our new press release.

The post Maximize Microsoft Teams ROI with Kollective Technology appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Improve Network Efficiency with Browser-Based Peering

browser-based peering

Organizations with many branches and remote locations know the challenges that come with broadcasting live and on-demand video to a distributed workforce. While most corporate networks do an excellent job handling the demand for one-to-one voice and video calls, things can – and often do – go south quickly when trying to deliver video messages at scale.

Think of your network like a highway on college football gameday. Every other day of the week, it’s fine; traffic flows seamlessly. But on gameday, the hour before kickoff, traffic is a nightmare. What normally suffices as a two-lane road, needs to be expanded substantially to meet the needs of ticket holders.

Although an infrastructure upgrade would take care of the problem, it’s not a cost-effective solution to address an infrequent event. The same logic can be applied to CEO Town Halls, All Hands Meetings and other important updates that need to be streamed to your employees at large.

Yes, you have the option to buy more bandwidth or upgrade servers, but that still caps your network. If your company grows or if your consumption of cloud services continues to increase, so will your bandwidth needs. The most scalable solution is to invest in an enterprise content delivery network (ECDN) powered by browser-based peering, also known as peer-to-peer or P2P.

How Browser-Based Peering Improves Network Efficiency

Modern ECDNs that use P2P networking rely on cloud-first microservices that supply scale and global reach. Instead of installing new hardware, it uses your existing network infrastructure – and the employees watching your event – to deliver content more efficiently. Kollecitve ECDN , for example, uses Microsoft Azure in conjunction with distributed client software and often uses in-place features within modern web browsers and cloud-first applications such as Microsoft Teams to scale video communications.

At content ingest, the first user to join the event at a particular location sources content directly from Azure Media Services CDN using HTTPS and creates a peering mesh that additional viewers from the same office will pull from.

Each peering node, as users are called, retrieves information about other nodes via the signaling process. Here, the requesting node establishes a WebRTC communication session with other nodes to determine and request the required data from available peers. In this instance, the WebRTC data channel is used as a transport mechanism.

Peer-to-peer communication utilizes DTLS/SCTP over UDP as the reliable and secure transport between nodes. DTLS provides a secure encrypted channel while SCTP delivers a reliable connection and congestion control.

Below is what your network looks like without an ECDN when broadcasting Live Video via Microsoft Teams, Stream or Yammer. With each user pulling the content directly from the source, the WAN gateway is overloaded, resulting in poor user experience or, worse, failed video delivery.

Enterprise network without an ECDN

This is what it could look like with a P2P ECDN like Kollective:

How Kollective's P2P ECDN scales video via peering

What If a User Leaves the Peering Mesh?

Peers can join or leave the mesh without impact to other users. If a peer leaves the meeting the intelligent peering mesh will simply adapt and reposition the other users without impact to the viewing experience.

Each receiving peer monitors the performance of the node they are sourcing from and, in the event of poor supply, can request content from alternate peers. If a user is unable to communicate with other peers, the machine falls back to the CDN for content retrieval, ensuring 100% content delivery.

Does Your Network Need Browser-Based Peering?

Now that you know what browser-based peering is, why it’s important and how it works, it’s time to see it in action. Visit our demo page to learn more.

The post Improve Network Efficiency with Browser-Based Peering appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Insights from the Kollective Network – Updated with April 2020 Data

CMMA Blog

As COVID-19 takes hold around the world, global enterprises are leveraging technology to stay connected to their workforce and keep them informed. Over the last couple months, Microsoft Teams grew from 20 million daily active users to 75 million, highlighting the importance of real-time communication in maintaining daily operations. Enterprise Content Delivery Networks, like Kollective’s ECDN , play a big role in this as they allow businesses to scale the delivery of content across enterprise networks without increasing bandwidth or putting other critical applications on the network at risk.

At Kollective, our robust client list ranges from top airline and utility companies to leading pharmaceutical and auto manufacturers. This gives us deep insight into how enterprises across all business segments are using ECDNs to overcome the communication challenge presented by COVID-19. Here’s what we’re seeing.

Top 4 Kollective Network Insights

1. 90% of enterprises using Kollective’s ECDN have used video to address their global organizations on the impact of COVID-19.

2. The total number of Live Events broadcast from the Kollective platform jumped over 50% from January to February, stayed roughly the same from February to March and in April, increased another 40% over the previous month.

3. From January to February 2020, the average number of Live Events per customer increased 30%. This is in contrast to 2019, where there was virtually no change over the same two months. While we saw a slight dip in March 2020, the average number of Live Events increased by 45% in April.

4. From January to March 2020, Live Events engaged 67% more employees across organizations, coinciding with greater adoption of collaboration tools.

The Key Takeaway

Although our network data tells a number of interesting stories, the most compelling is the rise of live video. Within a week of social distancing measures taking effect, businesses identified the need for real-time communication and switched to live video. As a result, the content reached a wider audience and had higher engagement.

In these challenging times, global enterprises are leveraging modern workplace tools to keep their organizations moving forward through better communication and collaboration. Live video is proving to be an asset for communicating real-time information and engaging the global workforce.

To see how Kollective’s ECDN can benefit your enterprise business, sign up a free 30-day trial.

The post Insights from the Kollective Network – Updated with April 2020 Data appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Microsoft Teams Adoption Spikes 50% in the Last 4 Months

CMMA Blog

Microsoft Teams has reached 20M daily active users, up 50% in just 4 months. With this rapid adoption, it is obvious that teams all over the world know the value of easily accessible collaboration and communication tools. But Teams isn’t the only player in this field. The competition in the market is fierce .

Building a team is no easy task and creating an environment where all team members have a voice, where discussions can happen in real time, regardless of geography or language barriers and where teams can make business-critical decisions is even harder. That’s why more and more organizations are adopting Microsoft Teams. They know the value of uniting their dispersed workforce to strengthen culture, maximize engagement and, most importantly, increase productivity.

If you have ever been a part of a thriving, balanced and successful team, you know how amazing that can be. Along with their growth announcement, Microsoft has put in time and resources on some very compelling research on “The Art of Teamwork”. Microsoft Teams is designed to help every team achieve it. By following Microsoft’s Art of Teamwork Guide , your team can achieve the following benefits:

  • Team Purpose: Keeps teams focused, fulfilled, and aligned on achieving their objectives.
  • Collective Identity: Fosters a sense of belonging and helps team members work together as a unit.
  • Awareness and Inclusion: Enables teams to navigate interpersonal dynamics and value everyone’s perspective.
  • Trust and Vulnerability: Encourages interpersonal risk-taking in teams.
  • Constructive Tension: Serves as a generative force for new ideas, driving better outcomes.

The overall idea being, if you can achieve those five things within your own team when tensions or conflict arise, rather than pulling the team apart, it will lead to innovation and transformational outcomes including a thriving company culture, enhanced decision making and more engaged team members. And who doesn’t want all of that? If you haven’t already, get your team up and running on Microsoft Teams and put these “Art of Teamwork” ideas into practice.

Are you concerned that Teams adoption and an increase in Live Events will increase the load on your network? That’s where Kollective comes in – easy to demo, easy to try and easy to buy we will help offload up to 99% of the bandwidth used running live events via Microsoft Teams. Get started today for free!!

The post Microsoft Teams Adoption Spikes 50% in the Last 4 Months appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here