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Case Study
This case study applies to a solution that Softech was part of. The
customer is a government-related healthcare provider in the United
States, with a network of nationwide centers and more than 250,000
employees.
Business Problem: Training Dilemma
Tasked with figuring out how to deliver 40 hours of training
annually to each of its more than 250,000 employees around the
country, without spending a fortune
Business Solution
The Customer found the answer to its training dilemma in the
satellite network it used to provide unidirectional broadcasts to its
major medical centers across the country, including Puerto Rico. The
Customer had served up four channels of live and prerecorded content,
mostly training and news - essentially a private cable TV service - out
of an uplink center in St. Louis. It used dedicated bandwidth on
PanAmSat's Galaxy 10 satellite
Bandwidth Challenges
Unidirectional broadcasting, in which each user gets a dedicated copy of
the video programming, wasn't going to work. Heavily populated network
segments would have clogged quickly.
Multicasting, which is inherent in a satellite network, made the
perfect solution. With IP multicast, the Customer's Employee Education
Service (EES) easily could blast out a single version of a stream or
file to each employee needing the training. With IP multicast, a single
video stream gets sent to multiple LAN users.
The Customer's IT Vendors and Partners, and its own Network
specialists figured the satellite offered them the best means of beaming
bandwidth-intensive live and on-demand video content to individual
desktops in the hospitals without disrupting the terrestrial WAN.
Video Knowledge and Learning Solution
Once the network infrastructure has been laid, need for a Network
aware Learning solution managing content, delivery, user tracking,
recording completions, crediting learning credits to the Customer's
Employee Databases and User Authentication with the custoemr's Network
was identified
A Web Based Knowledge Network ( Video Learning Solution) by Softech
Worldwide provided all nuts and bolts to manage ( add, edit, modify)
content, deliver live or on-demand content, manage users, provide
complete user tracking, keep record of viewing history, crediting
history to each employee’s profile over this award winning content
delivery network
End Result
The $4.5 million project let the Customer meet federal and
departmental training mandates while creating a better-educated
workforce and reaping huge cost-savings over alternative methods.
The cached content - a video demonstrating blood-handling techniques,
for example - is delivered upon request using unicast. Each content
engine can store about 30G/bytes or approximately 60 hours of material
at a time, with content rotated in and out by the EES. Users access the
available content via a Web interface by Softech Worldwide and view the
streams using Cisco's IPTV player or Windows Media.
Savings
Additionally, the Customer can educate its employees on a broader
basis. For example, after Customer specialists attended the annual
American Telemedicine Association conference, they held an eight-hour
seminar in Long Beach, Calif., to share what they learned and related it
the Customer's needs.
A single H.320 [ISDN] video call at 384K bit/sec is about $50 an
hour, plus some money for the bridge that connects participants. Now,
there's no additional cost for all the streaming users.
Overall, the EES expects to get a $25 million return on its
investment over the next three years by delivering content directly to
users at their desktops
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