Download PDF
Remote Support Capabilities Serve a Vibrant Professional School
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Education
Use Cases
- Remote Collaboration
Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
The IT department at the Viterbi School of Engineering, part of the University of Southern California, was facing challenges in providing support to over 600 full-time and part-time faculty, staff, and student employees spread across 20 buildings on and off campus. The existing remote support capability was limited, necessitating frequent on-site visits. This was not only time-consuming but also added to the costs. With the IT environment continually growing and evolving, the department realized the need to improve its incident handling speed and capacity and reduce the need for on-site support visits.
About The Customer
The University of Southern California (USC) is a leading private research university founded in 1880. It is home to more than 38,000 students and 3,500 full-time faculty members. The Viterbi School of Engineering is one of 18 professional schools at USC and contributes approximately one fourth of the university’s annual sponsored research. The IT department at the Viterbi School supports more than 600 full-time and part-time faculty, staff, and student employees that work in 20 buildings on and off campus.
The Solution
The IT department at the Viterbi School considered several remote support solutions, including NetSupportManager, LogMeIn, TeamViewer, and Apple Remote Desktop. After a careful evaluation, they chose Bomgar. Bomgar's extensive API support allowed the department to integrate its internally developed service desk ticketing system, tying recorded sessions with service desk tickets for future referencing and training. This enabled the creation of a knowledge base of historical support incidents and record how they were resolved. Bomgar’s collaboration tools improved the IT support team’s efficiency by allowing virtual collaboration on any issue, bringing in second-tier and third-tier support quickly whenever required. Bomgar’s dynamic session policies, including Jump Client technology, enabled the IT department to seamlessly support the approximately 1,100 faculty and staff computing devices, 120 virtual servers, and 400 computers in instructional labs whether they were attended or unattended.
Operational Impact
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
IoT platform Enables Safety Solutions for U.S. School Districts
Designed to alert drivers when schoolchildren are present, especially in low-visibility conditions, school-zone flasher signals are typically updated manually at each school. The switching is based on the school calendar and manually changed when an unexpected early dismissal occurs, as in the case of a weather-event altering the normal schedule. The process to reprogram the flashers requires a significant effort by school district personnel to implement due to the large number of warning flashers installed across an entire school district.
Case Study
Revolutionizing Medical Training in India: GSL Smart Lab and the LAP Mentor
The GSL SMART Lab, a collective effort of the GSL College of Medicine and the GSL College of Nursing and Health Science, was facing a challenge in providing superior training to healthcare professionals. As clinical medicine was becoming more focused on patient safety and quality of care, the need for medical simulation to bridge the educational gap between the classroom and the clinical environment was becoming increasingly apparent. Dr. Sandeep Ganni, the director of the GSL SMART Lab, envisioned a world-class surgical and medical training center where physicians and healthcare professionals could learn skills through simulation training. He was looking for different simulators for different specialties to provide both basic and advanced simulation training. For laparoscopic surgery, he was interested in a high fidelity simulator that could provide basic surgical and suturing skills training for international accreditation as well as specific hands-on training in complex laparoscopic procedures for practicing physicians in India.
Case Study
Implementing Robotic Surgery Training Simulator for Enhanced Surgical Proficiency
Fundacio Puigvert, a leading European medical center specializing in Urology, Nephrology, and Andrology, faced a significant challenge in training its surgical residents. The institution recognized the need for a more standardized and comprehensive training curriculum, particularly in the area of robotic surgery. The challenge was underscored by two independent studies showing that less than 5% of residents in Italian and German residency programs could perform major or complex procedures by the end of their residency. The institution sought to establish a virtual reality simulation lab that would include endourological, laparoscopic, and robotic platforms. However, they needed a simulator that could replicate both the hardware and software of the robotic Da Vinci console used in the operating room, without being connected to the actual physical console. They also required a system that could provide both basic and advanced simulation training, and a metrics system to assess the proficiency of the trainees before they performed surgical procedures in the operating theater.
Case Study
Edinburgh Napier University streamlines long-distance learning with Cisco WebEX
• Geographically dispersed campus made in-person meetings costly and inconvenient.• Distance-learning programs in Malaysia, India, and China required dependable, user-friendly online tools to maximize interaction in collaborative workspaces.• Virtual learning environment required a separate sign-in process, resulting in a significant administrative burden for IT staff and limited adoption of collaboration technology.
Case Study
8x increased productivity with VKS
Before VKS, a teacher would spend a lot of time showing a group of 22 students how to build a set of stairs within a semester of 120 hours. Along with not leaving the teacher much time to provide one-on-one support for each student to properly learn carpentry, it also left a considerable amount of room for error. Key information would be misinterpreted or lost as the class was taught in the typical show-and-tell way.
Case Study
Scalable IoT Empowering GreenFlex's Sustainable Growth
GreenFlex, a company that supports sustainable development, decarbonization, and energy efficiency, faced several challenges in its quest to expand its business. The company needed to deploy a robust and sustainable IoT technology to support its growth. It was crucial for them to monitor and control devices at customer sites in a safe and reliable manner. They also needed to integrate devices across a range of communication protocols and gather and act on data to meet efficiency targets. GreenFlex had previously built IoT capabilities into its digital platform, GreenFlexIQ, to monitor and manage customer sites remotely. However, they soon realized that they needed a new platform to support their ambitions. They needed a platform that could scale to connect more devices for production management and make it easier for the operations team to manage devices in the field.