GSK are a science-led global healthcare company, with three businesses that research, develop and manufacture innovative pharmaceutical medicines, vaccines and consumer healthcare products. Their team is comprised of over 99,000 people across 95 markets around the globe.
Don Clark is the Director of Collaboration, Social, and Broadcast Engineering at GSK. He shared his views on how real-time insight, enabled by IR’s solutions, helps provide assurance that their unified communications (UC) systems remain reliable, and meet their diverse and evolving user needs.
The Problem
Don and his team are tasked with providing the systems and solutions the organization needs to deliver on business requirements, bring to market an extensive catalogue of products and services, and meet the needs of their staff, partners, and customers.
But this is no easy task. GSK’s UC systems and infrastructure are an extensive web of legacy systems, with newer solutions brought into the mix as they acquired various companies and products over the years. Combined with the sheer scale and geographical spread of their user network, GSK’s UC ecosystem is incredibly complex.
Visibility into this ecosystem was poor, with little to no insight into system performance. Often, they only became aware of problems after a user complaint was lodged, and then it would take an average of 16 engineering hours to identify and resolve the issue.
“One thing you don’t get in a video meeting is a second chance. If a meeting fails, it reflects upon your company, your technical team, and your technical prowess. When you have medical researchers and scientists working with people across the world, you don’t want to them to lose faith in the technology,” said Don.
The Solution
GSK have been an IR customer since 2019. They deployed the IR Collaborate suite of solutions to monitor their Polycom and Cisco environments, and gain insight into UC video performance.
What we really needed was to see problems before our users called us. And that’s what IR gave us – the ability to see our environment in real-time, as it was running, and not wait for the user to call and then react.
The Benefits
With IR’s solutions, Don and his team were able to gain the real-time insight they needed to take a more proactive approach to resolving issues in their environment.
End-to-end visibility enabled GSK to identify the root cause of most of the recurring problems in their ecosystem. Legacy systems and routes were creating congestions points that had previously gone unidentified. They were then able to make the necessary upgrades to prevent those issues from happening again.
Working with IR’s Professional Services team, GSK built customized reports and dashboards that gave Don and his team fast, easy access to the information they need to keep their business running and consistently deliver a great user experience.
“We created a custom dashboard that gives us a view of our meeting services. It tells us when the experience is not up to par, then we can drill down and investigate the cause before it impacts the larger audience,” Don explained.
“The team at IR are dedicated to rolling up your sleeves and working with us, not just selling us a piece of software. You’re focused on delivering business value,” said Don. “We got value out of the box with IR, but the additional value we’ve got with customization is priceless – we solve most of our problems in under 5 minutes.”
With the greater efficiency enabled by IR’s solutions, Don and his team are focusing on higher value tasks.
“Automation is the next step in our plan, like building in automatic sequences that can open and route a ticket, or help us better understand the network. This is really going to improve the quality of service we can offer.”
If I could use one word to describe what IR gives us, it’s assurance – assurance that what my team is providing is reliable and is meeting the needs of our users.
Don Clark
Director of Collaboration, Social, and Broadcast, GSK
