Telecommunications services

Tender description

JSL's customers have enjoyed the benefits of a highly capable national video conferencing solution, the Janet Video conferencing Service (JVCS), for well over a decade. Currently it manages ~6 000 conferences per month across ~500 registered organisations, and usage is growing at ~15 %, although with planned expansion into a wider European market, JSL expect additional step-changes in the required capacity of the service. In a major upgrade to this service undertaken in 2013-14, the software components of JVCS were replaced with a bespoke resource management system (RMS) developed by JSL in partnership with coding house Azeus. This new generation of our video conferencing capability was re-branded as Vscene and launched in August 2014. This procurement addresses the second phase of this upgrade to the service, replacing the legacy hardware infrastructure, which is mostly based around Cisco MSE 8 000 chassis and Tandberg VCS gatekeepers (with some Vidyo hardware recently introduced to bolster interoperability that is likely to be retained). JSL's goal is to deliver at least the same set of MCU functionality, recording and streaming capacity as the current infrastructure provides, but JSL hope to introduce greater efficiency and an expanded feature set through this refresh. It should be emphasised that the new infrastructure will be managed directly from our RMS software.