by: VMware Director for Global AV and Events Josh Burton, VMware Sr. Multimedia Product Manager Jal Chen, VMware Manager for Multimedia Engineering and Deployments Rishi Prakash, and VMware Multi-Media Solutions Architect Felipe Giannazzo
In a world where remote work, virtual meetings, and efficient communication are paramount, the ability to oversee and manage the complete Zoom environment from a single platform is a game-changer. Our Homegrown Internet of Things (IoT) platform Smartspaces® comes with its unique ability to centralize and manage the status of all devices, accessories, and virtual rooms integrated with platforms like Zoom. See Figure 1.
Figure 1: Smartspaces – modernizing global conference room management
This innovative functionality stands as a pioneering solution yet to be present in the market. By consolidating the real-time status of various components, Smartspaces establishes a comprehensive view that streamlines operations and enhances organizational efficiency. This groundbreaking capability addresses a critical gap in the current landscape of conference room management tools.
Smartspaces offers a centralized dashboard that monitors the status of devices, accessories, and virtual rooms connected to Zoom. This feature empowers organizations to proactively address issues, ensure smooth operations, and provide a seamless experience to users. See Figure 2.
Figure 2: High-level architecture of Smartspaces.
Smartspaces enables organizations to harness the power of centralized information and proactive management. This ultimately leads to enhanced productivity, better resource allocation, and an elevated stakeholder experience.
The challenge
Several challenges triggered us to start this development:
- A distributed global workforce with more than a thousand physical conference rooms and thousands of virtual conference rooms.
- Our lack of all-in-one platform visibility
- Resource constraints that require a smart prioritization system
- Ability to proactively manage our collaboration environment
- Need for scalability
- Need to reduce integration complexity
- Need for IoT device management
- Desire to maintain workflow: operation teams need step-by-step standard processes for device set up, calibration, and troubleshooting
- A customizable dashboard, with real-time status updates for all rooms and devices, quick oversight, and actions to take.
How Smartspaces helped VMware IT overcome challenges
Smartspaces successfully tackled several challenges faced by conference room operation teams through its multisite management, remote monitoring and control, and maintenance-alert features. With its multisite management capability, operation teams can oversee and manage conference rooms across different locations from a single platform, eliminating the complexities of handling multiple interfaces.
The remote monitoring and control feature empowers teams to troubleshoot and manage devices in real time, regardless of their physical location, to streamline issue resolution and reduce downtime. Additionally, the maintenance alerts system proactively notifies teams about potential malfunctions, enabling them to address issues before they disrupt meetings. Overall, these features simplify the challenges of overseeing a distributed conference room infrastructure, allowing operation teams to ensure seamless operations, enhance resource allocation, and deliver exceptional colleague conference room experience.
Features of Smartspaces
Smartspaces encompasses several essential functionalities:
- Global infrastructure overview via a comprehensive tree view of the organization’s infrastructure, allowing easy monitoring of room statuses in real time
- Status indicators and room information: through red, amber, and green (RAG) status indicators and detailed room information enable quick issue identification and proactive problem solving
- Outages and alerts provide a dedicated dashboard for tracking outages and alerts, ensuring prompt responses to technical issues and minimizing disruptions
- Smartspaces’ analytics dashboard capabilities offer insights into room usage patterns, occupancy rates, and resource allocation, assisting in data-driven decision making.
- A room sweep and commissioning function streamlines the setup and configuration of conference rooms, expediting their readiness for effective meetings.
In a modern work environment where streamlined operations and effective communication are crucial, Smartspaces is a tool that meets, and surpasses but surpasses these needs, making it an indispensable asset for workplace management. The importance of Smartspaces to VMware lies in its ability to
- Optimize management: smartspaces simplifies complex tasks and ensures efficient operations by centralizing conference room data display management
- Enhance visibility: the global infrastructure view and status indicators provide a clear overview, facilitating real-time monitoring and intervention
- Enable proactive solutions: rapid issue identification through RAG indicators and room information empowers timely interventions, preventing disruptions
- Provide operational insights: the analytics dashboard offers valuable data for making informed space utilization and resource allocation decisions
- Ensure prompt responses: the outages and alerts dashboard guarantee swift reactions to technical problems, reducing downtime
- Streamline setup: the room sweep, and commissioning feature accelerates room preparation, preparing spaces for productive collaborations
- Foster collaboration: well-managed and equipped conference rooms created by Smartspaces promote a conducive environment for effective collaboration
Elevate professionalism: by presenting organized and technologically advanced conference spaces, Smartspaces enhances an organization’s professional image.
VMware Manager for Multimedia Engineering and Deployment Rishi Prakash explained that “Smartspaces is an all-in-one platform developed in-house by the VMware Multimedia and Emerging Technologies team. It supports end-to-end lifecycle management of the multimedia estate by integrating various applications.” The key functions are:
- Single pane of glass for global infrastructure
- Conference room deployment
- Room data repository
- Active monitoring (RAG status, outages, and alerts)
- Automated room sweeps
- Reporting and analytics for Multimedia and Emerging Technologies Team
- HelpNow tickets
- Booking a room
- Asset management using the checkout feature
- Zoom rooms status and devices
VMware Multimedia Solution Architect Felipe Giannazzo added that “many vendors offer management and monitoring solutions specific to their products. Still, there needs to be a clear gap in the market for the “Switzerland” of IoT analytics and device monitoring specific to AV hardware and software. When managing more than a thousand active collaboration spaces using a variety of hardware makes and models, observability is critical for enabling centralized teams to conduct proactive maintenance and promptly respond to incidents.
Smartspaces is our homegrown solution addressing these requirements. Functions such as automatic self-testing, firmware/software update management, integrator-led device onboarding and asset tracking, troubleshooting and ticket creation, reporting, alert history, and targeted notifications reside in a single pane of glass.
With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), an area of focus for VMware is producing more insights with the wealth of data available via this platform. Imagine, rather than providing a simple alert status to your ops team, we can instead tell them what has changed since yesterday. What is the pattern behind the alert? Is there a common attribute that may be the root cause for the alert? This is where data truly becomes actionable.”
What’s next?
Future features:
- Automation: self diagnose and self healing
- All-in-one device inventory lifecycle system connect with the device management system
- AI-enhanced predictions to help operation teams proactively allocate resources and prevent resource shortages.
- Integration with IT service management (ITSM) tools to streamline incident report, ticket creation and issue resolution processes.
- Proactive maintenance alerts to allow issues be addressed before disrupt meetings.
VMware Director of Multimedia Josh Burton noted that “in the ever-evolving landscape of collaboration trends, driven by consumer hardware and BYOD practices, Smartspaces emerges as our tailored response to the critical challenge of streamlining operations across diverse environments through a singular, intuitive interface. As we grapple with a multitude of data sources, the need for a cohesive platform becomes increasingly vital, and our in-house development endeavors have deftly bridged this gap. Amidst a plethora of specialized solutions tailored to specific products, a clear void was discerned—an absence of a comprehensive IoT analytics and device monitoring tool, purpose-built for AV hardware and software. This becomes even more pressing as we manage an extensive network of more than a thousand collaboration spaces, making observability a linchpin in proactively maintaining operations and responding nimbly to incidents. “
Our internally cultivated Smartspaces solution seamlessly integrates automated self-testing, automatic room sweeps, firmware/software update management, integrator-led device onboarding, asset tracking, troubleshooting, comprehensive reporting, and targeted notifications, all within an intuitive dashboard. Empowered by the prowess of AI, Smartspaces transcends conventional alert systems, venturing into the realm of discerning patterns, attributing causality, and extracting actionable insights from raw data. This transformation heralds a new era of operational efficiency and strategic decision-making while effectively saving valuable human hours that were previously expended on manual room testing.
This topic continues to evolve, so contact your account team to schedule a briefing with a VMware IT expert to hear the latest. Check out our more Digital Workspace blogs. For other questions, contact [email protected].
We look forward to hearing from you.
VMware on VMware blogs are written by IT subject matter experts sharing stories about our digital transformation using VMware products and services in a global production environment. To learn more about how VMware IT uses VMware products and technology to solve critical challenges, visit our microsite, read our blogs and IT Performance Annual Report and follow us on SoundCloud, Twitter and YouTube. All VMware trademarks and registered marks (including logos and icons) referenced in the document remain the property of VMware.
