Covid upheaval drives digital transformation for StageVision

One of my favorite tasks in my role at Barracuda is interviewing customers about their experiences and writing up the case studies that end up being published here. I always learn interesting things about industries I’m not familiar with. And I get to talk to IT professionals about the creative and innovative ways they’ve used our products to solve their business problems.

A recent example was my conversation with Kevin Ruck and John Christie, the top tech guys at StageVision, an audio-visual company specializing in live, high-end corporate events. I got a real lesson in how the Covid lockdown had permanent effects on that industry—effects that required a major digital transformation; and then another one.

The shift to virtual

With the lockdown in March 2020, StageVision found itself forced to make a sudden shift to virtual events. They quickly realized they’d need to learn modern networking quickly—although both were highly experienced and skilled A/V technicians, neither was trained in IT or had a networking background. 

And they did! In a testament to the rock-n-roll, get-it-done culture of the A/V industry, Ruck and Christie learned what they needed to, and implemented a highly reliable digital infrastructure to host high-quality virtual events. And that included using Barracuda firewalls to secure and optimize traffic—after all, many of the corporate events they run include transmitting sensitive company information, and security was a major client concern.

After the lockdown

What I found fascinating was how after the lockdown ended, in-person events returned, but they had been deeply transformed—events now are all IP-based, with huge amounts of content being streamed constantly. And everything that Ruck and Christie were forced to learn to keep their business alive in lockdown meant they were ready for the new, digitized in-person event industry. 

They quickly adapted their infrastructure for the road, using small, portable Barracuda CloudGen Firewall appliances. And as they’ve worked out efficient processes for operating in this new environment, they’ve found a really creative way to use our Zero-touch Deployment technology. 

They ship all their gear, including the firewalls, to the next event location. While it’s in transit, they create the specific configuration files they need for the coming event. When the firewalls arrive, there’s no network engineer needed. Whoever is doing the initial setup can just plug them into the network like any other component and they will download and install the configuration files on their own.  

I enjoyed talking with Ruck and Christie. I got a fascinating glimpse into a unique industry and how it was affected by lockdown. And I learned how two creative technicians responded quickly to changing requirements by digitally transforming their business—twice—with Barracuda’s help. 

Get the whole story by reading the case study.