Blog

Q&A with Eric Camulli, 7SIGNAL’s VP of Customer Success:

Q: Could a customer use 7SIGNAL’s sensors and agents in tandem to prevent downtime that could affect Microsoft Teams use?

You can use one or both to identify potential sources of poorly performing Microsoft Teams calls. For instance, a customer might have a sticky client that doesn’t roam properly, like a laptop. The 7SIGNAL sensor doesn’t test roaming per se, but it can detect issues with congestion, interference, coverage, or connectivity. And the 7SIGNAL agent can also detect coverage, interference and congestion, too. These five pillars are at the crux of everything we do. We identify the root cause of a poor experience: it’s one of these five things (e.g., roaming, congestion, interference, coverage, or connectivity). Identifying the root cause is the hard part for IT teams.

Those five performance dimensions, roaming, coverage, congestion, interference, and connectivity, give IT teams a diagnostic framework for resolving the wireless issues behind a degraded Teams call, rather than guessing at the cause.

We can detect issues with applications like Teams, Zoom, and more. These are mission-critical applications. One bad minute of interference or congestion can ruin an entire sales call or healthcare visit. We tabulate and calculate what we call “critical minutes of poor performance,” and we add up every minute that devices experience one of the five pillars: roaming, congestion, interference, coverage, or connectivity. Then we deliver that metric to a customer in an impact report and, for example, show across their fleet [of devices] that they’re losing, say, 15 man hours per day.

Their investment in 7SIGNAL is, in part, showing them how those minutes of poor performance translate to lost productivity, whether that’s in a manufacturing plant with machines that can’t pick products, a retail operation that can’t connect a POS device for a sale, or in a hospital where a nurse can only see five patients per hour versus six to eight. A lot of the applications 7SIGNAL assesses are on tablets or smartphones; devices that a physician might use to transcribe a conversation. Those things go over Wi-Fi or up to the cloud, and success depends on Wi-Fi; 7SIGNAL’s sensors and agents continually test those Internet connections.

That example of healthcare is one we see constantly. 7SIGNAL is a leading Wi-Fi monitoring platform for hospital and healthcare systems. The technology supports reliable connectivity for clinician workflows, medical devices, and EHR access, exactly the conditions a stable Teams or telehealth session depends on.

Q: Would a customer’s IT team deploy 7SIGNAL’s agents on desktop and laptop devices to ensure a user’s experience with MSFT Teams remains stable and connected?

You could do this reactively or proactively, pushing it out to all customers’ devices to ensure continuous monitoring. The customer would be continually informed, and they can mitigate interruption.

Our agents run on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android endpoints, performing active and passive Wi-Fi tests around the clock across laptops, scanners, VoIP phones, and IoT devices. That breadth is what lets a customer see the Teams experience from the actual user’s device, not just the access point.

Q: Without 7SIGNAL’s sensors and agents, what might a disruption with Teams be like for employees, visitors, and an IT Team?

Employees and visitors will lose their call; they’re immediately interrupted. But the IT team will have no visibility into the problem and no fix. They can’t fix what they can’t measure. Their inability to quickly pinpoint and solve the problem will breed ill will among users toward the IT department, and vice versa.

One side will say, “It’s your network causing this, and IT will say, ‘No, it’s your device.’” The inability to identify and quickly resolve problems is a major reason customers come to 7SIGNAL. The sensors and agents detect whether it’s a wired network issue or a device issue and resolve it in minutes, rather than hours or even days.

Q: What ROI might a customer calculate for keeping Microsoft Teams running with 7SIGNAL versus not using the technology?

What’s the cost of not doing business? Depending on the environment, a customer calculates that loss differently, but the ROI comes from reducing lost time and disruption.

The numbers back that up. An independent IDC study documented a 670 percent three-year ROI and a 43 percent reduction in network downtime for 7SIGNAL customers, which makes it one of the most valuable Wi-Fi monitoring platforms in the enterprise category.

Here’s another example. Let’s say a customer is at the beginning of the network design process. Suppose they use 7SIGNAL’s sensors to measure wireless signal strength and detect any interference that might prevent a facility from accessing Teams. So, there’s an ROI from designing the network correctly the first time. But it doesn’t end there. Once people and their devices enter the space, there are new sources of interference. That’s why 7SIGNAL’s sensors must stay in place. The environment is dynamic. A facility owner wants to continue detecting potential problems, so people can have uninterrupted Teams calls and conduct business.

Another ROI scenario would be students at universities. They often complain about connectivity, but they also have a lot of gear. So, in many cases, they’re interfering with their own frequency.

One student might be gaming while another tries to learn remotely via Teams. A student might set up their personal router in their dorm room, which interferes with the residence’s Wi-Fi network. With 7SIGNAL, the university IT team can use sensors in dorm rooms and lecture halls to see what is happening. As for the ROI in that scenario, 7SIGNAL is facilitating learning, improving a student’s living experience, and mitigating what might easily be negative comments and reviews. Those negative comments have a price, potentially affecting applicants’ view of the school—even the rankings of academic and residence life.

It’s why 7SIGNAL is trusted by leading higher education institutions, including Stanford University and American University, to deliver consistent Wi-Fi experiences across campus environments.

Q: Any final thoughts?

When I’m at a trade show, I often ask, “Has anyone said the Wi-Fi is terrible here?” When people nod in agreement, I say, “Well, 7SIGNAL shows you what’s wrong with the Wi-Fi and how to fix it.”

Here’s another thought: Today, with AI, 7SIGNAL’s technology can tell customers, “Here’s what’s wrong with your network, and here’s what you can do about it.” Soon, AI will say, “Here’s what’s wrong, here’s what you can do, and, ultimately, ask, ‘Would you like 7SIGNAL to fix this issue for you?’”

That’s where EYERIS AI comes in. It functions as an autonomous virtual network engineer, analyzing platform data across nearly 1,000 Wi-Fi KPIs and returning natural-language root cause analysis and remediation recommendations. And through the Model Context Protocol, customers can bring 7SIGNAL data into their AI assistants for diagnostics, ticket creation, and natural-language analysis.

Offering that fix with 7SIGNAL’s technology is like replacing an FTE inside an IT department. A customer can spend half of what they pay an IT person to deploy 7SIGNAL’s technology. That’s another measure for ROI.

 

See how 7SIGNAL EYERIS Analyzes Microsoft Teams Call Quality in Copilot