Background

A meeting was held at the GÉANT offices in Cambridge in February 2015 between David Foster (CERN IT and GÉANT board member) and GÉANT Senior Management. It was discussed whether the 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 Product Management Team 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 video conferencing service, using Vidyo licenses hosted on CERN infrastructure.

Through community consultations, it has become 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 analyze 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:

“Make the adoption of useful WebRTC services easier by adding them to the GÉANT Cloud Catalogue, with framework agreements where opportune. In particular, make one or more easy to use WebRTC desktop video conferencing services available to all European R&E users through the GÉANT clouds service catalogue, soonest.”

The GÉANT project’s new “Application and Service Delivery Development” team is going to actively look into video conferencing solutions – primarily those supporting the WebRTC protocol and native browser clients – either offered by the NREN community or by commercial partners, out of their own cloud infrastructure or hosted in third-party clouds.

 

The service

Following a request from the Swiss NREN (SWITCH) to act as the intermediary/reseller for the same video conferencing service that CERN operates for its user community using the Vidyo product, GÉANT have been working with CERN and Vidyo to construct an integrated service bundle for SWITCH where:

• Vidyo provides the video conferencing technology and software.
• CERN provides hosting in their highly reliable cloud infrastructure.
• GÉANT manages end-user licenses, accounts, billing and provides second line support. 
  
  

The main characteristics of this service (as described by Vidyo) are set out below:

• Can scale to multiple thousand concurrent users.
• Up to hundreds of participant in one meeting.
• Licenses are needed for the maximum number of concurrent users and not all the individual users.
• Multi device support: iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, room systems.
• Multi protocols and systems support: WebRTC, H.264svc, SIP, H.323, Skype for Business.

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 and other 3 NRENs answered right after we meeting. 10 responses were received from the active TF-WebRTC community participants and 4 from those NRENs that are not represented in TF-WebRTC.

Summary of answers

There is a clear trend of transition from traditional H.323/SIP hardware based VC systems to Web-based RTC software solutions.

The "Other" category mostly represents the cases where the traditional and the new service types co-exist and/or interoperate.

Most of the NRENs are willing and able to host video conferencing services (any type) in their own infrastructure (85.7%).

This does not necessarily mean that any hosted solution would not be interesting for them, this is just the fact that they are technically capable.

Some NRENs would be happy to take video conferencing services from other partner NRENs (and presumably from GÉANT and/or other community members), others not.

No extremes in this case, the community is pretty much divided into two almost equal groups. (57% more likely, 43% less likely). The usual "build vs. buy" division is reflected here.

Asking about the specific Vidyo/CERN/GÉANT service, it is "less likely" or "no" that NRENs would take it. (71.4%).

2 answers are definitely not and 4 answers are more likely. The detailed analysis below attempts to explain the main reasons behind the results.

Detailed analysis

Other than the raw numbers of the survey, there have been some informal discussion with some of the TF-WebRTC participants in Berlin that contributed to the full picture.

Why 71.4% are negative about the deal

• There was no EU tendering procurement done by GÉANT for purchasing Vidyo licenses. This puts a serious limitation on the number of licenses that can be purchased by the community all together and implies other difficulties in complying with the national public procurement rules and regulations in the different EU countries.
• Due to the given complexity of the specific deal, the underlying agreements are governed by three different jurisdictions and laws; the US law, the UK law and the Swiss law. This represents a chain of risks to the NRENs coming from a third European country.
• The uncertainty around the SLAs and other commitments in the specific model further increases the likeliness of the NRENs' negative opinion.
• The offered unit price of the Vidyo licenses cannot be attractive enough without tendering, it remains in the same ballpark that NRENs could individually negotiate for.

What the others are interested in

• Two of the respondents signaled their interest in investigating whether or not the existing national Vidyo services could be integrated with the given CERN multi-tenancy architecture so that peek demands could be off-loaded there.
• Four of the respondents signaled their interest in further understanding and analyzing the given deal.

What about the demands

• The four NRENs that signaled their interest would represent an aggregated demand that goes a way above the EU tendering limitation. They reported about 85 institutions and 73k end-users in total.
• The demand above would indicate the purchase of 1500-3000 Vidyo licenses while GÉANT can only buy about 500 licenses without tendering procurement per year. Tendering is inevitable!

Conclusions

1. The specific Vidyo/CERN/GÉANT service deal is not favorable by most of the NRENs as is. It will only be serving SWITCH.
2. The presented model is not salable without tendering procurement so it cannot be safely offered to other NRENs.
3. It is not recommend to make it available via the GÉANT Cloud Catalogue as NRENs could easily run into scalability and other national legal issues.
4. Taking the level of demand that the few positive answers represent, it is recommended to GÉANT to look into other models to satisfy the community needs for hosted/un-hosted video conferencing services.

Further work

The GN4-2 project’s WebRTC Tasks (T4 and T5 under JRA4) – in conjunction with the open GÉANT Task Force on Web-RTC (TF-WebRTC) - will further investigate the feasibility of other models suitable for the community primarily using the GÉANT Cloud Catalogue and federated service delivery pipeline. The following aspects will be taken into consideration:

• The real value of any joint tendering procurement exercise must be modeled and demonstrated to the community through the community.
• Not only the aggregated purchasing power of the community (that usually leads to a better deal only with a couple of percentage points) but other community benefits (i.e. common pool of shared licenses for serving peek demands) must be investigated.
• The burden of the joint procurement must be taken up partly by the community and firm commitments should ensure that the demand stays alive through the lengthy process.