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Network Capacity Planning for Live Video

CMMA Blog

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

Respond to Changes in the Financial Services Industry with Microsoft Teams

CMMA Blog

Although 2020 has been a year of unprecedented challenges, it has also been one of tremendous opportunity – especially in the Financial Services Industry (FSI). Innovations in FinTech have drastically changed the way the world banks. But it’s not just consumer-driven technologies that are changing the game. Enterprises worldwide are turning to Microsoft Teams for webcasting and videoconferencing to bolster internal communications and reach remote employees in new and unique ways.

The Value of One-to-Many Communication Tools for Employee Engagement

The reason so many banking, insurance and capital market organizations have flocked to Microsoft Teams for live video broadcasts is simple: there is a lot to gain but even more to lose by not supporting employee engagement.

Let’s look at the numbers:

  • 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
  • For every 0.1 percentage point employee engagement increased, individual Best Buy stores saw a $100,000 uptick in annual operating income
  • Quantum Workplace surveyed 75,000 employees across 18 industries and found that the finance industry ranked 10th for employee engagement

Quantum Workplace also found that leadership’s commitment to creating a positive work culture is the number one driver of employee engagement. According to their report, Employee Engagement in Finance, “Coming out of the shadow of distrust that dampened recruiting and retention efforts since the Great Recession, it’s not surprising that today’s finance employees expect a positive and supportive culture from their employers.”

A study released by Qualtrics in April 2020 examined employees’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the biggest issues plaguing employee wellbeing is a lack of communication and unclear expectations. In fact, an employee whose manager is not good at communicating is 23% more likely to experience mental health declines.

One of the best ways to create a positive culture – particularly during troubling or uncertain times – is to implement video into your communications strategy.

Business Benefits of Enterprise Video

One of the biggest benefits of using video for enterprise communications is that is can be used asynchronously, meaning viewers can watch it when it is convenient for them, not just for corporate headquarters. This helps avoid long, complex email chains that can be difficult to follow given the number of new emails arriving in an employee’s inbox daily (120 on average).

Recent research shared by AIHR Digital supplies even greater context:

  • Employees are likely to retain 95% of a message when they watch a video
  • 93% of internal communicators believe video is a valuable tool
  • 59% of executives would rather watch a video than read text

In addition to a general preference for it, video can help increase executive visibility to build trust between leadership and employees. While virtual updates cannot replace face-to-face communication, video helps create a culture of informed credibility and authenticity.

How to Scale Live Events in Teams and Stream

For financial institutions with global offices and employees, this is all great news, especially with new features for Microsoft Teams and Stream releasing monthly. You can broadcast Teams Live Events like CEO Town Halls and All Hands Meetings to up to 20,000 employees, and when the event is over, it will automatically save to and populate in Stream for those who were unable to attend to watch later.

There is one caveat though: bandwidth in corporate offices.

Not having enough can mean buffering at best and event failure and disruption of business-critical applications at worst.

With the majority of the workforce still at home, this might not seem like a problem; however, even a limited number of staff onsite (roughly 20%) pulling video directly from the source can overload your network. Before COVID, it was commonplace for organizations to broadcast live events from theaters and auditoriums. With physical distancing measures the new normal, anyone who once sat in the auditorium will now be streaming video individually at their desk.

While your first thought might be to call up your internet provider to purchase more bandwidth or to go out and buy hardware that will extend your network, it’s not the most cost-effective solution…or the fastest .

An enterprise content delivery network (ECDN) built on a foundation of WebRTC technology is.

Kollective ECDN for Microsoft 365 and Financial Services: KBC Bank Case Study

A Microsoft Gold Partner, Kollective is trusted by more than 135 Global 2000 enterprises to deliver seamless live event broadcasts. Our end-to-end ECDN platform and services enable organizations to reach all employees, unlocking new levels of productivity and collaboration – just ask KBC Bank.

With Kollective ECDN, they were able to achieve:

  • Engagement and collaboration at every level
  • Ability to broadcast simultaneously to KBC’s 42,000 employees worldwide
  • 1500% increase in video production and distribution
  • Video distribution times reduced from two days to under two minutes
  • HD-quality video streamed from any location and on any device

If you’d like to learn more about how Kollective helped transform digital communications at KBC Bank, download the case study.

The post Respond to Changes in the Financial Services Industry with Microsoft Teams 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

Can Your Network Handle the Demand for Live Video?

CMMA Blog

It was only two months ago IT teams and network operators faced an unprecedented challenge: shifting entire workforces out of the office and into the home. As difficult as that was – rushing to implement collaboration tools, securing networks, etc. – we are again on the precipice of change: employees returning to the workplace.

As someone who works on the technical side, you might be thinking, “Why do I need to be concerned about that? It’s the facilities and HR departments who have to worry about things like social distancing.” Here are a few reasons why it matters to you too:

  • Not everyone will return to the office at once, or even for eight hours a day. Instead, this elastic workforce will be splitting their time, which means a continued reliance on videoconferencing platforms like Microsoft Teams to collaborate with peers.
  • The demand for video doesn’t stop there. Because the workforce is so widely distributed, corporate communications will continue to lean on live and on-demand video to share important messages at scale.
  • The future of work has changed – at least for the time being. Gathering in theaters and auditoriums for CEO Town Halls and All Hands meetings is an outdated practice. Because of social distancing, employees will instead stream Live Events individually from their desks, putting significant strain on your network.

Now, let’s dig into some insights from the Kollective network to add more color to the conversation.

The Rise of Enterprise Video

Each month since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, we’ve been pulling data on how our 135+ Global 2000 customers are using Live Video to communicate with their employees.

  • 90% of Kollective customers have used video to address their global organizations on the impact of COVID-19.
  • 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.
  • From January to February 2020, the average number of Live Events per customer increased 30%. This contrasts with 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.

Although I think the results speak for themselves, you may need a little more convincing. Check out these industry-specific charts highlighting the increase in Live Event broadcasts and unique user counts over the last calendar year – video events skyrocketed in Q1 2020.

Financial Services

Health Life Sciences

Manufacturing

Understanding the Impact of Video Streaming on Corporate Networks

As Live Video usage in enterprise organizations continues up and to the right, you’re going to see a greater impact on your corporate network. That’s because video is a bandwidth heavy medium and not all networks can handle the demand. Insufficient bandwidth for webcasting generally leads to buffering, jitter and in worst case scenarios, event failure.

For context, Live events created in Stream or “External app or device” produced Live Events from Yammer or Teams will get a fixed encoding profile, according to Microsoft :

  • 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.

Offset Bandwidth Issues with an ECDN

The quickest, easiest and most cost-effective way to offset the bandwidth constraints caused by video distribution is to add an ECDN to your tech stack. An ECDN is software that allows businesses to deliver content at scale.

Kollective ECDN uses a combination of cloud-based centralized servers and distributed client software to empower organizations to achieve their digital transformation goals. We securely distribute high-quality video content across the enterprise without affecting business critical applications or user experience.

A browser-based peering, platform, also known as P2P, Kollective self-optimizes to learn a network’s topology, creating a mesh between viewing devices and intelligently routing data packets in real-time. By learning how to deliver live streams efficiently, Kollective ECDN ensures that no matter when a video is consumed or shared, bandwidth is automatically preserved.

Join Us for a Webinar: Is Your Network Ready?

If you want to learn more about this topic, I’ll be covering it in depth in Kollective’s new webinar, “Is Your Network Ready?” Join us on June 24th at 9am PST/12pm EST/4pm GMT. For those that can’t make it, an on-demand recording will be available to watch online.

The post Can Your Network Handle the Demand for Live Video? appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here