Customer Case Study: UDTConnect™ Integrated Collaboration, Content Sharing and Display Solutions - Southeast

Customer Case Study: UDTConnect™ Integrated Collaboration, Content Sharing and Display Solutions – Southeast

CLIENT – INDUSTRY VERTICAL

Education: School District, Southeast U.S., with numerous schools for elementary (K-12), charter and technical education, including a technical college

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

One of UDT’s clients is a southeast U.S. educational district comprising over 50 schools including standard K-12 and charter schools, as well as a technical college, with nearly 50,000 students and 7,000 full and part-time employees. The District is a large, strategic client for UDT, for which the company provides a number of IT business solutions and technical support services. The District described to UDT a number of requirements to consolidate learning systems and data and create more opportunities for the use of these tools and information for student and teacher collaboration across many different school types, campuses and learning paradigms. To connect all of the services necessary to support information sharing at such a scale, and innovation and more creative, effective teaching and learning, and to offer these programs across many campuses, would be prohibitively complex and expensive for any large school system.

UDT’s pre-sales consulting team learned about the District’s requirements to better consolidate teaching, learning and other services, and decided to introduce to its senior management the company’s unique, patent-pending UDTConnect™ solution. UDTConnect is a complete, fully managed, proprietary solution for collaboration and content sharing, communications, broadcast media, as well as comprehensive digitally supported security and safety, all through a single smart display. UDTConnect is delivered in partnership with Samsung® Electronics and developed using the Miracast™ standard for wireless connections between laptops, tablets, and smartphones to smart displays running on Microsoft® Windows 10, the system utilizes server and integration software run on Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Azure® Cloud. (UDT is a Microsoft Gold Competency Partner in multiple Microsoft business and technology disciplines.)

All communications, broadcast media, IP camera feeds, and potentially any device controlled by a wireless connection can be integrated into the system and used with the smart display. In short, the devices are integrated into a comprehensive system for a unique, streamlined offering to end-users. In the case of UDT’s private elementary school client, UDTConnect could bring together standard and proprietary learning, information-sharing, creative and other applications with data streams and more, right to one central display, across campuses – of any size – classrooms and more.

UDT’s presales team undertook a consultative effort to understand the needs for collaboration in the District’s classrooms and/or other campus locations and many facilities. This involved the development – collaboratively between the District’s leadership and UDT’s team – of a unique proof of concept for a consolidated service into which complex data and application feeds could be brought together for optimal educational and information-sharing experiences.

Accepted by the District, following this discovery, UDT was engaged to implement over 500 UDTConnect displays/services within the District’s schools and facilities. UDT helped the school to determine hardware, software, and professional services to implement UDTConnect on-premises (“on-prem”). The specific UDTConnect solution for the District is UDT’s on-prem service, utilizing existing IT infrastructure, not the 100% bundled offering that can be provided to other clients. This enables the District to leverage economies of scale to upgrade – under educational budget – the backend services for systems controlling data streams and application delivery and share them through a still seamless to users (i.e. students and teachers) UDTConnect display/visual front-end. The initial implementation was phased at 150, 150, 50 and 50 displays. UDT’s Professional Services team was deployed at each phase to support all facets of delivery—some of the implementations involved preconfiguration and implementation in UDT’s staging center, others were performed largely onsite. The services to benchmark, test and implement UDTConnect for the different campuses and facilities in the District was and continues to be supported by UDT’s Professional Services team, executed in further, phased deployments. Continued support during and post-deployment was, and continues to be, facilitated by UDT’s Lifecyle Management Services Organization. The successful initial implementation has led to the District requesting deployment of further UDTConnect services—over 400 more systems are planned to be deployed this year (in 2019).

CO-SELL OPPORTUNITY

UDT is a Microsoft Gold-competency Partner. UDTConnect™ has been developed through a unique cooperation between UDT, Microsoft – including the company’s global Internet of Things (IoT) team – Samsung Electronics, and distribution and other partners.

OFFERING:

UDTOpenConnect™:
Connects through standard video connection to third-party projector or other display
Managed services offering running on standard X86 intel-based CPU instruction set, utilizing Microsoft® Windows 10 and UDT’s proprietary UDTOpenConnect software (enabling digital signage, communications, emergency notifications and more)

SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS:

UDTConnect’s server and integration software both run on Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Azure Cloud. The solution’s package server software runs on VMs in Microsoft Azure.
UDTConnect can capture IoT data from devices and technology, load this information into the Microsoft Azure Cloud, and be utilized in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Business Intelligence (BI), Machine Learning, Cognitive Services and more—all of this only possible through the cloud (leveraging Microsoft Azure).
The solution also uses Microsoft services to track the consumption of content: It is scheduled on a Microsoft-powered, UDTConnect content channel, which organizations can utilize to determine how many times content is consumed, where it is consumed and more, and then build data statistics for the effectiveness and utilization of digital learning and other assets.
If the delivery of the UDTConnect solution is on-premises (“on-prem”), it requires Windows Server (IIS) or Microsoft Azure VMs.
UDT’s solution wirelessly connects Windows devices, presentation and collaboration to displays via Miracast®.

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