table of contents

At a Glance

Industry: Education

Employees: 2,400+

Students: 15,000+

Locations: 3

Why Lifesize

  • 4K video and content quality
  • 99.99% uptime
  • Microsoft integrations for Teams, O365, Active Directory

Overview

Established in 1992, the Universiti of Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) was the eighth public university incorporated in Malaysia, originally registering students in two faculties: the Faculty of Social Science and the Faculty of Resource Science and Technology.

Today, UNIMAS has expanded to 10 faculties, with 2,300 educators and staff delivering 45 undergraduate programs and 40 postgraduate programs to more than 15,000 students.

Challenge

With a technical staff of just four employees, the Universiti of Malaysia Sarawak’s IT team is accountable for supporting a number of mission-critical applications, including Microsoft Active Directory, Office 365® and video conferencing use cases for both students and educators. With university employees and students spread across three locations, the UNIMAS IT team experienced rising costs due to an increasing number of required trips to support on-site and video conferencing meetings between university employees and guests from government agencies, business partners and more. Without a reliable video conferencing solution in place, the UNIMAS IT team began looking for a modern solution capable of delivering a high quality, scalable meeting experience that supported all of the university’s use cases.

Solution

After an exhaustive review and with support from Lifesize partner AudeoNet, the Universiti of Malaysia Sarawak selected Lifesize as its video conferencing solution provider due to its ease of use, uptime and enterprise-grade scalability. To improve reliability and performance for users, UNIMAS IT deployed Lifesize’s flagship 4K meeting room systems across its locations, providing a significantly enhanced 4K-quality video conferencing experience for the university’s wide-ranging use cases, including faculty meetings, employment interviews, large-group guest lectures, product demonstrations and more.

“Our on-premise video conferencing system was unreliable and required significant technical knowledge and resources to maintain. Now with Lifesize, our users’ impression of video conferencing has completely changed. The 4K experience is beyond anything we’ve had before, and we’re now seeing more video conferencing sessions than ever before.”

— Alhadi Bujang, Senior Assistant Director of IT Infrastructure, Universiti of Malaysia Sarawak

Outcome

Now equipped with a reliable, 4K-quality cloud video solution, UNIMAS IT is seeing the adoption of video conferencing skyrocket to all-time highs, with students and educators increasingly moving their communications to video. Due to the platform’s ease of use and the ability to remotely manage and maintain meeting room equipment, UNIMAS IT has also reduced travel costs and improved productivity for its technical staff.

“Since implementing Lifesize, we’ve already saved approximately MYR45,000 in travel expenses in just two months. We’ve also significantly improved productivity for our small team as employees now have more time in the office instead of constantly traveling between locations.” 

Fueled by both rising adoption and significant cost savings, the UNIMAS team is already planning to expand its Lifesize deployment, including to a new teaching hospital.