RMIT University Symphony Case Study

Network Issue That Would Have Affected 5,000+ Students Averted Day One Utilizing AVI-SPL’s Symphony

AVI-SPL’s Symphony is its proprietary User Experience Management Application that simplifies user engagement with AV and UC technology, improves technology reliability, and enables positive business outcomes. Following the weekend onboarding of hundreds of rooms and thousands of devices into Symphony, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) technicians were notified on Monday morning that all AV and UC devices in a campus building were unreachable. Technicians isolated the single failure point and resolved the issue – with no disruption to students or staff and well before classes started. Crisis averted.

Innovative Approaches: From Reactive to Proactive
Ranked as one of the top 250 universities in the world, RMIT brings the latest technology into its classrooms and spaces for students and faculty. Because its user community depends on that technology for learning, RMIT needed to support thousands of technology devices from various manufacturers. It is inefficient, unscalable, and disruptive to require technicians to manually check all devices or to wait for users to request AV support. Prior to the Symphony implementation, RMIT was using multiple applications to access only about 10% of its AV estate for online monitoring.

“This was a problem because classes were disrupted, and time was wasted in the delivery of education,” says Shane Somerville, head of managed services for Connected Vision Group.

A Single-Pane View into the Collaboration Technology Estate
Through Symphony’s mobile-friendly, cloud-based platform, RMIT staff monitor the status of meeting rooms, classrooms, and other areas that have networked AV and collaboration systems. The Symphony service gives IT and AV support teams a simple, single-pane view of all that is happening across their collaboration technology estates.

For the first time, RMIT can see the operational status of its networked AV infrastructure across multiple campuses in different countries. Symphony monitors over 4,600+ devices across over 1,000 rooms in 100+ buildings worldwide and proactively alerts technicians to issues so they can be resolved before students and staff are affected.

Proactive Resolution = Faster and Efficient Resolution
The university’s addition of AVI-SPL’s Symphony platform has lowered client-initiated tickets while increasing auto-detected tickets, based on thresholds defined by RMIT. Auto-detection will enable the university’s AV and IT support resources to, over time, lower their field support personnel requirements and costs by providing data-driven guidance as to the health of the estate. It’s also helping create a reliable, high-quality teaching and learning experience for its faculty and students because it’s driving down the mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Symphony benefits have already been proven in numerous situations that would have previously taken valuable time and resources while also interrupting classes. Symphony service thresholds alerted the AV support team to a device that was going on and offline throughout the night. When the team investigated the location, they realized the culprit was a faulty power supply unit (PSU). Through analysis, the team then found that a number of these PSUs were faulty and proactively replaced them.

Same Technology, Higher Quality Video Conferencing
Because Symphony monitors AV and video conferencing devices, it has resolved longstanding video conferencing quality issues. One such issue was between campuses in Vietnam and Melbourne. Symphony’s live monitoring and call statistics showed gradual drops in network speed over the duration of calls between the two cities. With that live data and the ability to look at historical call statistics, RMIT narrowed down which settings should be adjusted to increase the reliability and quality of calls. The multi-country AV support teams were able to fix the issue and collaborate better.

Actionable Business Intelligence
By accessing business intelligence, organizations make informed decisions about their operations. The data from Symphony’s reports and analytics helps guide decisions about what technologies may need upgrading, optimizes internal business processes when thresholds are reached, and identifies trends over time.

“Since Symphony’s implementation, RMIT’s audio-visual services team has become more efficient and improved the student and staff experience,” says Tim Sullivan, RMIT senior manager of operations for learning, teaching and research.

The Partnership
Connected Vision Group, an alliance of commercial AV service and solution providers, partners with AVI-SPL to support projects based out of Australia and New Zealand. InSight Systems, one of the members of Connected Vision, provides AV support services to RMIT University. AVI-SPL and InSight Systems closely collaborated to provide RMIT a way to take control of its AV and video systems in order to provide better support for its instructional capabilities and academic performance.

“Anything we’ve asked for and needed help with, AVI-SPL has been there every step of the way,” says Luke Hogan, RMIT AV operations manager, Connected Vision Group.