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A meeting was held at the GEANT Association GÉANT offices in Cambridge in February 2015 between David Foster (CERN IT and GEANT Association GÉANT board directormember) and GEANT GÉANT Senior Management. It was discussed whether the GEANT Association GÉANT would be prepared to provide a contractual mechanism to allow SWITCH to use CERN based infrastructure for the provision of video - conferencing services. The driver for this was the costly support for Cisco MCU systems that SWITCH would incur after expiry of their contract in August 2015.
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 video conferencing service, using Vidyo licenses hosted on CERN infrastructure.
Through community discussions, it became clear that some NRENs other than SWITCH would also be interested in taking off-the-shelf, hosted video conferencing services of Vidyo or other vendors' software. Therefore, GÉANT started to investigate whether or not the model that works for SWITCH could be extended to other NRENs. Part of this investigation was to issue a mini survey and analyses the NREN responses who were keen on giving us feedback.
Survey introduction
The following introduction was given to the survey.
The GÉANT project’s WebRTC Task – in conjunction with the open GÉANT Task Force on Web-RTC (TF-WebRTC) – ended up with a set of recommendations for the European research and education community, reported in the Deliverable 12.3 “WebRTC Requirements and R&E Deployment Roadmap”. One of the recommendations is as follows:
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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
The survey was announced on the week before the TF-WebRTC task force meeting on 3 May 2016, in Berlin, Germany. There were 11 NREN answers received by the TF-WebRTC meeting on 3 May 2016 and other 3 NRENs answered right after we meeting.
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