In many ways, Carousel Industries is no different from its customers in terms of its IT requirements. Increasingly, one of those requirements is support for video communications.

Carousel is a company with more than 1,000 employees spread among 30 locations across the U.S. Like most companies our size, we’ve had some video capabilities for years. But, given some locations came via acquisition, there was no company wide video standard or strategy.

Given the business benefits and ROI potential of enterprise video, we set out to change that and create a video infrastructure that would serve the entire company – while still making use of the various investments we’d already made. To learn more about the project, we spoke with Nick Jarbeau, the Convergence Supervisor on Carousel’s internal IT team.

In the Beginning: Shaping a Video Plan

Carousel wasn’t exactly starting from ground zero. “We had a little bit of video capability,” Jarbeau says. “Some people had one-X Communicator clients that work with the Avaya PBX, some had Microsoft OCS video, but not everybody.”  Some of the remote offices had video codecs, “in various states of working or not,” he says.

As is often the case at Carousel, the company set out to get its video house in order while keeping its customers in mind. “We approached this as a tremendous, real-world learning opportunity.  We wanted to deploy a scenario that was comprehensive and bullet-proof enough that we could then deploy for other large customers like us,” Jarbeau says.

His team surveyed the company landscape and ultimately selected 14 of its larger offices, selected on the basis of expected video utilization, capacity and the market each served.

The end goal was simple: make video as unified as possible, such that no matter what platform an end user is employing – soft client on a PC, a video unit in a conference room, mobile phone or tablet – it is all easy to use and works together seamlessly.  Now, add one more twist to the project:  the need to deploy and integrate the video platforms of Polycom, Avaya and Lifesize (Carousel partners all) and make it work flawlessly, and you can see the scope of the challenge facing the project team.  “We looked at this and said, if we can make this highly complex scenario work here, we can execute for any client.”

Mapping a Video Network and Configuration Strategy for Enterprise Video

With the 14 sites selected, the next step was to determine bandwidth requirements. “We looked at the existing network and thought putting video on it would be A., very expensive and B., very taxing, affecting the performance of everyday voice and video,” Jarbeau says.

The solution was to bring in additional circuits dedicated solely to video communications. “It was more cost-effective to just put T1s in all the offices and route all the video across those and keep it completely separate from data and voice traffic,” he says.

Another design decision was to install a Polycom RMX videoconferencing bridge at Carousel’s headquarters data center in Exeter, R.I. “We’re using the bridge for anything other than a point-to-point call,” Jarbeau says. While some codecs in the branch offices are capable of making multi-point calls, from a bandwidth perspective Carousel determined it was better to have a single fat pipe at just the Exeter location; the pipe is big enough to support video sessions with all 14 locations at once. Without having to support multipoint calls, the remote locations could get by just fine with the T1s, he says.

Calling All End Points and a Final Test

At its various locations, Carousel uses a mix of Polycom and LifeSize videoconferencing equipment, and a slew of clients. Microsoft Lync sees significant usage, as do the Polycom clients for desktops as well as IOS and Android devices.

Ensuring each client type would work reliably required a series of integrations. “In Phase 1, we got the entire Polycom infrastructure up and running,” Jarbeau says. “Then we just kept looking at what else we could make work, like Lync and so forth.”

When all the integrations were complete, it was time for a final test. “We sat in a room and wrote down on a giant white board all the possible scenarios where someone may want to use video,” he says. “iPhone to Lync desktop, Lync to room system or room to Lync, Lync to bridge, video unit to video unit, recording calls; you name it, we thought of it and tried every single one.”

Once the Carousel team determined each one worked on a small scale, it enlisted the entire support department to dial in to the Exeter bridge at the same time, along with some remote users. It all worked flawlessly, laying the foundation for a multi-vendor enterprise video reference architecture.

Having performed all these integrations, now Carousel can share its visual communications experience with customers and do the same for them. If you’d like to take advantage of what today’s video technology can do, contact Carousel - we can share some first-hand experience.