Sharing Services
Between NRENs
Case study: v-scene
Mark Tysom
Janet, UK
TF-MSP Meeting
Valletta, 28 November 2014
Agenda
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Background
Rationale
Approach
Tariff Structure
What’s Included?
Challenges
How to subscribe
Progress to date
Questions
The Janet Videoconference Service
• Established in 1995
• Infrastructure and VC booking system
• 8,151 registered videoconferencing systems
• 10,000 registered users
• 1,112 participating organisations
• 50,000 conferences per year
• New service (“v-scene”) launched August 2014
Rationale to extend customer base
• Approval and funding to re-develop the VC booking system
• Aware that some NRENs had stopped or were planning to
stop providing a VC service to their customers
• Potential gap in market between no service and commercial
off-the-shelf product
• v-scene: “for education, by education”
• 20 years experience of operating a VC service for education
and research
• Maybe we can share this by offering the service to NRENs…
Approach
• Conducted an EU competitive dialogue procurement
• Contracted with Azeus: software application developer
• All IPR remains with Janet
• Contract: Janet have the right to sub-license the software to:
– The international education community
– The UK public sector
Tariff Structure
• UK Education and Research
- centrally funded for schools, colleges, universities, research
• UK Public Services
- reduced rate for public sector bodies with an education remit
• Commercial
- tariff for providers of educational video content and services
• International Education and Research
- GPD based calculation for other NRENs
v-scene NREN Tariff
• Uses the same calculation as the GEANT Cost Sharing Model
• Charges increase progressively as GDP increases
• Used to generate a starting price
• Additional services can be bolted on:
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MCU integration
User migration
Interface language translation
Branding
• Prices start from €35,000 p.a. for managed service
What’s included?
• Annual fee for the booking system software
• Set up and support (UK hours)
• Streaming and storage of recordings (21 days)
• MCU capacity
• Discount of up to €12k for “donation” of an existing MCU
• Licenses for Vidyo desktop client
• Subject to acceptable use policy
Challenges
• Janet’s first attempt at offering an international service
• Choosing which metric to base charging on is hard
• Usage: fair but only works for NRENs with existing data
• At the outset we only have our own data to work from, eg:
– to support x users we need y staff and z MCUs at a cost of…
• Used this to predict how the service needs to scale and what
costs would need to be charged to cover them
How do NRENs subscribe?
• Discuss and agree pricing with Janet
• NRENs make a direct award to Janet by making a case that the
service represents a unique offering
- Designed to facilitate the delivery of education
- Designed to support a diverse community of users
- Supports multi-vendor MCUs
- Supports multi-vendor VC hardware
- Federated and traditional login supported
- Wide variety of educational content providers
- Facilitates collaboration with international NREN communities (single directory)
- Development roadmap tailored to the needs of education and research
• Issue a VEAT notice for transparency
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Advertises the intention to award a contract directly without call for competition
Can only award contract after 10 working days have passed without challenge
Contract signed by both parties and dispatched to OJEU within 48 days
Progress to date…
•Discussions with 5 NRENs
•Received a variety of responses
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we want a free service…
that’s much cheaper than we currently pay!
we’re not sure of the demand within our country
can we have some test accounts?
•Will review existing charging model in 12 months
•Considering introductory price option
•HEAnet (Ireland) first NREN to sign-up
Questions?
Mark Tysom
Product Manager
mark.tysom@ja.net
0044 1235 822 223
28/11/14