Virtual Solutions for a Virtual World – Cisco Blogs

As they began planning the worldwide broadcast of their Global Innovation Challenge,  Logicalis team members knew they faced a huge challenge. As a socially minded company, Logicalis had challenged its 6500 employees to come up with innovative ways to solve social or environmental problems facing their communities by leveraging Cisco’s broad technology portfolio. Logicalis has taken a leadership position in bringing to market innovative applications that solve real-world problems by combining its intellectual property with Cisco technologies through Cisco APIs and Cisco DevNet resources.

Now, after six months of regional competitions, the scene was set for the 2.5-hour Logicalis’ Global Innovation Challenge, a show to be watched by a global audience of 3500. Similar to the Shark Tank reality TV show format, the five-team finalists would present their solutions to the global judging panel in hopes of being crowned the winner.

With team members located in different geographies, live streams were sourced from 30 different sites. Team members also used a number of different modalities such as live camera feeds, canned videos, and presentation slides to showcase their solutions. After the presentations, team members participated in Q&A sessions with the judges.

Pre-pandemic, the playbook for running such an event was well understood—hire an event planner, locate a venue, purchase plane tickets, and rent hotel rooms. Now, however, a company wanting to disseminate multiple stories to a worldwide audience must figure out the complexities of staging a consumer-grade virtual reality TV show.

But it’s even more complicated than that. An enterprise-grade virtual reality TV show  has to simultaneously stream from multiple locations to thousands of participants around the globe, while supporting numerous content modalities—all while delivering a seamless audience experience.

This scenario is complex not only from a platform delivery perspective, but also because of the need to bring the right people and their supporting content together—flawlessly—and at precisely the right time.

To pull this event off, Logicalis began by exploring standard video conferencing technologies such as Cisco Webex. And though this technology can broadcast to thousands of participants simultaneously, organizing and producing a broadcast-quality TV show requires a skillset that Logicalis simply did not have in-house.

So Logicalis turned to the Cisco Webex Webcast team for help. This team delivers an end-to-end webcast solution, including experienced professionals to manage and produce the event. The Cisco Webex Webcast team created a personalized execution plan to meet Logicalis’ specific requirements—before, during and after the event—and  helped ensure that it ran smoothly. For example, much of the scene building was designed up front so that the right people appeared at the right time with the right supporting content. And after the event, Cisco provided Logicalis with the metrics and analytics it needed to measure the event’s success.

The reality is that in many respects we’re transitioning to a virtual world, which brings with it different levels of complexity, different requirements, and the need for innovative solutions. Making the move from physical to virtual conferences is an example of this transformation. Clearly, staging a compelling virtual show can be challenging, because it requires not only access to great technology, but also to the people and services needed to deliver a flawless customer experience.

Cisco and Logicalis, in partnership, offer an amazing breadth of technologies, services, intellectual property, and innovative people to meet the challenges our mutual customers face. Putting on a flawless Global Innovation Challenge show is just one of many examples.

For more information about how we work effectively across
industries and use cases, visit the Logicalis and Cisco Partnership site.

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