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Eric: Welcome to EDUCAUSE 2012. This is Eric Tooley with Vidyo, and I'm here with Shel
Waggener of Internet2, and Andrew Keating, and Brett Flenniken. We're here to talk about
the new NET+ offerings that Internet2 is rolling out with access to more services for more
types of universities.
Shel: I think you look at a service like Vidyo, it's perfect for NET+, because we're really
talking about how you connect people faster and easier. Vidyo is all about doing that.
The barriers, really, are in the technology now; the services and the quality of product
that you have are widely recognized as being a need. The problem is, how do we get them
to people? How do we make them easy to use?
Internet2, by virtue of our research and education network, has the capacity to handle the highest
quality video needs available. Beyond that, we want to make it simple for people, so that
a researcher doesn't have to think about what they have to do to connect with somebody:
they can just connect. So the more we can integrate tools like Vidyo and other services
into the NET+ catalog, where anybody can simply add that service to their campus's portfolio
of offerings, then the faculty, the students, the staff, the researchers can go to those
catalogs and say, what are the tools I need to get my job done, instead of having to spelunk
around, finding them on the web. The easier we can make it, the more we can package these
services up to be delivered over the world's fastest network, the better we're going to
be.
Eric: It sounds like you take a real load off the IT departments. You guys manage the
technology and the contracts, and make sure that the solutions work already, then you've
really validated everything you offer.
Shel: Everything we're doing is to shorten the distance between the faculty and the learner,
the researcher and the research, the graduate student and a graduate student somewhere else
in the world. The distance between those two people is not bound by the network -- it's
actually bound by policy, bureaucracy, contracts, inconsistencies -- if we can eliminate those
things, the network and the tools will take care of the rest.
Eric: That sounds great, and perfectly aligned with what Vidyo tries to do to eliminate the
boundaries that keep people from being able to collaborate. It's great to work with you,
thanks so much for visiting us here at EDUCAUSE!
Shel: Thanks, welcome to NET+ and Internet2.