A large, publicly-traded managed care enterprise was in the middle of an aggressive Citrix VDI deployment. As it was upgrading its desktop computing infrastructure, one of the key considerations was the company’s heavy reliance on video to communicate with its nationally-dispersed on-site and mobile workforces.

“Video was an important means of communication between the company’s leadership team and its employees,” said Vern Hanzlik, President and CEO of Qumu. “From quarterly company town halls, to regional meetings, the organization wanted to ensure that it was delivering an exceptional viewing experience for its employees. This was a tall order as unlike most consumer networks, corporate networks are not necessarily built to support the delivery of high-quality video on demand.”

To meet its key requirement for the delivery of high-quality, on-demand video content to its workforce, the managed care enterprise tapped into IGEL, a world leader in software-defined endpoint optimization and control for the secure enterprise, and Qumu, the leading provider of best-in-class tools to create, manage, secure, distribute and measure the success of live and on-demand video for the enterprise.

High quality video viewing experience for VDI End-Users

With the advent of Netflix, Hulu and other on-demand video services, end-users have come to expect greater parity when it comes to their viewing experiences at work. Traditionally, in Citrix VDI environment achieving high quality video rendering has been a challenge. Besides, the video streams for each viewing session were coming into the data center and could easily overload the inbound network. “In order to protect the data center network most companies resorted to using audio-only streams or low quality video” continued Hanzlik. “However, with more and more employees on VDI endpoints support of high-quality video for critical enterprise use cases such as training, corporate communication, knowledge sharing became a must-have requirement. Recognizing this need Qumu worked with IGEL and Citrix on implementing a solution that meets the quality of video requirement and is friendly to the corporate network.”

Qumu’s Enterprise Video Platform optimizes video delivery in the Citrix VDI environments by re-routing all streams from the data centers to the endpoints. With the Qumu solution, the endpoints get streams directly from the closest specialized edge proxy-cache (Qumu VideoNet Edge), so the data center network is free from pulling videos. The quality of video playback is drastically improved too as the video are rendered on the endpoints rather than on remote virtual desktops.”

“We are excited to be teaming with Qumu to improve the video experience for end-users,” said Jeff Feige, VP Systems Engineering, IGEL. “With Qumu’s Enterprise Video Platform, end-users who are logged into their IGEL workspace, whether from a desktop computer or their mobile device, can access corporate video streams while inside a VDI session, via their web browser. The high-performance video and audio codecs built into the IGEL solutions enable an optimal viewing experience, alleviate buffering and improve video quality.”

High-Quality Video Experience Promotes Workforce Diversity and Inclusion

Millennials already are currently the largest segment in the workplace, according to a recent survey by The Pew Research Center. And, by 2020, it is expected that 50 percent of the U.S. workforce will be comprised of millennials. Further, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by 2030, 75 percent of the workforce will be millennials.

“As our workforce becomes younger, we need to find ways to adapt better to the way these employees prefer to work, and video is a huge driver,” said John Poole, VP WW Channel and Alliances, Qumu. “Even before we started working with this large managed care enterprise, the customer was already very keen to leverage video to communicate internally with its employees – it was a huge part of their culture. Being able to communicate with employees from across the entire company is a huge benefit, and the key to engaging with a geographically-dispersed and diverse workforce.”

Some of the key benefits the customer is experiencing as a result of its deployment of IGEL and Qumu within its Citrix VDI environment include the timely and concise delivery of corporate content and messaging; improved engagement between executive leadership and employees; and, a more inclusive corporate culture where shared wins and personal interactions drive success.