Cisco last week announced a new product and service bundle intended to nudge companies into using Internet-based training and educational programs.
Cisco’s e-learning service is a package of its Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN) integrat
Cisco last week announced a new product and service bundle intended to nudge companies into using Internet-based training and educational programs.
Cisco’s e-learning service is a package of its Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN) integrated with applications from software and service vendors. Services based on Cisco’s ECDN products could help companies conduct employee training or customer seminars over the Internet.
Express Personnel, an Oklahoma City staffing firm with 400 franchise offices worldwide, is installing its own Cisco Content Distribution Managers for delivering sales instruction videos to 70 sites in North America. Video content will be pushed to the Content Distribution Managers, which act as servers, in each office at night, saving bandwidth during working hours, according to Art Atkinson, vice president of training and development at Express Personnel.
"Our offices only have 56K [bit/sec lines] running to them," Atkinson says, which makes it impractical to send live streams. "Each workstation in an office will be accessing video over the local area network," which will also provide better video quality than a stream, he adds.
Cisco has partnered with two network integration firms – KPMG and iXL – to help deploy the e-learning service in organizations. Cisco has also teamed with several service providers that will offer Cisco-based e-learning services based on an application service provider model.
Service providers certified to offer Cisco e-learning services include Convergent Media Systems, Digital Island, Digital Pipe, Relera and Verado.
According to Cisco, a company with 3,000 employees in 50 sites could deploy Cisco’s e-learning service for approximately $1 million, including integration costs. For an organization with 25,000 employees in 300 sites using two ASPs for deployment, the cost would be around $5 million.
Eleonora Panto