Author: Alan Sears

Video technology has evolved over the past ten years to allow people to communicate and collaborate better in both their personal and professional lives. Applications like Skype or Facetime are useful for adding a video element to remote conversations with your friends and family. But the requirements by businesses for lifelike and interactive systems are driving the development and adoption of more robust solutions for connecting with internal and external stakeholders.

The latest high-definition video systems enable real-time communication while also bringing a personal level of interaction through face-to-face conversation. Video collaboration or telepresence technologies provide an efficient solution for training sessions, meetings and collaboration across geographical boundaries. Organizations of all sizes have realized that they can deploy these technologies within their existing network infrastructure to help quickly influence growth and success.

Here are a few of the specific benefits that can be realized by integrating video for communications within your organization:

– Improve productivity by enabling quicker decision making.
– Reduce expenses associated with corporate travel.
– Strengthen relationships with clients and business partners.
– Demonstrate a commitment to sustainability and energy savings.
– Increase collaboration and interoperability based on open-standards.
– Scale quickly based on the evolving needs of employees.

Our business partner Cisco offers an extensive portfolio of video systems to meet the needs of your employees while also supporting your IT team with intuitive technologies that are easy to integrate within the framework of your existing infrastructure. These range from a dedicated, large room series to desktop solutions. So which one makes the most sense for your business? A better understanding of the three telepresence “experiences” – Immersive, Multipurpose and Personal can help answer that question.

Cisco’s immersive systems deliver all of the necessary elements for your meeting room or training facility including lighting, cameras, surfaces and audio equipment. The fully-appointed solutions provide a high quality, life-like meeting experience. They are also designed for simplicity and ease of use.

The multipurpose experience can be used to enhance your existing meeting spaces. They provide a collaborative user experience for dispersed teams to meet and communicate face-to-face. This series of systems offers simplified installation, use and management. Your IT team will appreciate how the design delivers framework that supports easy integration, large-scale adoption and rapid deployment.

Their personal telepresence solutions offer all of your employees the power of video collaboration delivered to their workspace. These systems fit on a desktop and can operate on PC or Mac platforms. The personal systems are also ideal for home offices and telecommuting.

If you’re interested in learning how video Collaboration can positively impact your business let us know. We can begin discussing which combination of the three telepresence experiences listed above fits your needs and applications.

You probably remember from my recent post on What “The Cloud” Means to Your Company that there are both public clouds and private clouds. We defined private clouds are resources shared by one organization. More specifically, private clouds offer dedicated server space that is hosted either internally or externally. The platform can be managed in-house or a third party can support and maintain the hardware and applications.

A private cloud provides your company with a pool of IT resources that can be allocated across departments. This allows you to quickly and easily deploy services based on the needs of your employees. The old process of buying a new server to support the requirements of a specific business unit has been replaced with a system that allows you to create virtual servers and carve out the necessary resources to support your team.

Understanding how other organizations use private clouds to optimize their business is helpful to identifying opportunities within your own business. The state of New Mexico embraced this model to cut costs, accelerate service provisioning and reduces its carbon footprint. The first video on this page offers a look at why and how they built a private cloud network.

Another example is CareCore National, a specialty benefit-management company that collaborates with healthcare providers and insurance firms to authorize an average of 45,000 medical procedures daily. They needed the ability to analyze very large data sets while also helping to lower healthcare costs and improve quality of care at the same time.

Implementing VCE’s Vblock Infrastructure Package, built with industry-leading technology from Cisco, EMC and VMWare, allowed them to realize the following results:

-Reduced time to launch new lines of business from six months to two weeks
-Increased time software engineers can devote to development from 50 to 80 percent
-Built foundation for multi-tenant HSX cloud service

For a little more detail you can download the CareCore National case study.

The private cloud methodology allows your IT team to create a single virtualized set of resources that can be offered on-demand as a service across your organization. Your infrastructure becomes easier to scale and quicker to deploy without major considerations given to hardware installations and integration. It also establishes an architecture that enables secure transactions, measured service and accountability for specific cost centers.

Contact us to learn more about our partnership with VCE and discuss how we can provide your organization with a converged infrastructure solution that delivers a complete private cloud along with pervasive virtualization.

Collaboration is changing the way businesses operate. As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts it helps increase productivity, improve teamwork and enable decision making. Smart organizations have embraced collaborative technologies to connect and build relationships with prospects, clients and partners. But they are also realizing that these technologies can be used to improve engagement with and between their employees.

The workplace is dramatically shifting due to the adoption of mobility, changing workforce demographics and application delivery options. Employees are becoming more comfortable with social media and virtual interaction in the course of conducting business. And the latest mobile devices and applications have left all of your stakeholders expecting to conduct business through their preferred means.

In response, companies need flexible software and communication services to facilitate employee collaboration. Cisco, offers a solution for linking your enterprise collaboration tools, the Cloud and your employees. Cisco Quad is a platform designed for today’s workforce: social, mobile, visual, and virtual. It helps connect your team to the information and expertise they need, when they need it.

Here are a few of the corporate applications that Cisco Quad can help support:
– Human Resources – Provide new employee orientation and training by offering one-stop access to mentors, corporate videos, documents, demos and peer communities.
– Product Development & Innovation – Improve the exchange of ideas through the ability to dynamically form communities for idea generation, brainstorming and discussions.
– Project Management – Enable more visible and streamlined communication flows while also sharing access to critical resources and shared collaboration tools.
– Sales Support / Sales Engineering – Assist with proposal development and RFP responses by creating cross-functional communities to help answer questions, locate relevant documents and co-author responses.
– Crisis Management – Maintain continuity thorough a crisis event through the ability to contact co-workers, share information and offer coordinated responses.

Cisco Quad also helps save money and decrease  the need for support from your IT team because it is delivered as cloud services eliminating the need to deploy and manage them in-house. It also provides enough flexibility so that end users can personalize their collaboration environment to support their work styles, instantly form communities to support organizational goals and collaborate in real time using their preferred communications tools.

If you’re interested in learning more about how establish and support a collaborative environment within your workforce let us know. We can provide you with an overview of how Cisco Quad integrates your existing collaboration tools with a broad set of social features that engage employees and quicken information access. We can also talk about some of the additional services available to increase collaboration with your clients and business partners.

There has been plenty of buzz about “The Cloud” over the past few years. The hype seems to have peaked recently with companies buying TV ads to highlight the benefits to consumers. For a price you can now access all of your personal content like music, documents and photos remotely. In addition, you can sync up your information between mobile devices and home based-based networks through intermediary technologies known as “The Cloud.”

But what does that mean for your company?

First, it is helpful to understand what The Cloud actually is. We define cloud-based computing as technologies that deliver computing over a network as an on-demand service. The model allows for sharing of applications, resources and data with computers and mobile devices almost like a utility.

There are both public clouds and private clouds. Public clouds are accessible in a broad public domain to individual users or multiple organizations. Private clouds are resources shared by one organization. Clouds have a few distinguishing characteristics; resource pooling, self-service, rapid scalability, measured service and in the case of a public cloud broad network access.

For small and medium businesses the reality is that cloud-based computing is a great opportunity to optimize your IT infrastructure and spending to allow for a renewed focus on revenue-generating opportunities. If implemented correctly private clouds can be used to deliver IT resources to your end users quicker with more reliably and at a lower cost. From both a business and technology management perspective these technologies can provide the following benefits:
-Business Continuity
-Disaster Recovery
-Improved Security
-Increased Scalability
-Rapid Deployment
-Reduced Operations Costs
-Simplified IT Infrastructure

Many vendors are only able to offer the individual components associated with cloud computing. However, our partnership with VCE allows us to address a client’s needs with a converged infrastructure solution that delivers a complete private cloud along with pervasive virtualization.

VCE brings together technologies from industry leaders Cisco, EMC and VMWare to make deployment quick and easy for your IT team. Their Vblock Infrastructure Platforms come pre-configured with computing, networking, storage, management and virtualization components built into scalable solution.

Let us know when you’re ready to talk about how The Cloud can help your business. We can also provide you with an assessment to determine which offering makes the most sense for your organization.

Collaboration is critical to an organization’s success. It helps drive innovation, improve customer service and support a communicative corporate culture. How you embrace technology will help define the impact of collaboration on your employees and your customer base.

To that point our partner Cisco offers an entire suite of collaboration tools that help improve engagement with all of your stakeholders. These include Collaboration Applications, Customer Collaboration, TelePresence and Unified Communications. Their products will help your team make decisions, solve problems, reduce costs and accelerate time to market. In addition, their solutions offer the flexibility to accommodate new developments as your needs evolve and help protect existing IT investments related to their technologies.

Collaboration Applications like WebEx can help add an online component to your capabilities. The application brings voice, video, and web conferencing capabilities individuals spread out at different locations. It can be used for real-time communication for meetings, sales, training, customer support and events. WebEx conferencing solutions will also help optimize the IT resources you already have in place as they are delivered through the SaaS model to support easy implementation and scaleability throughout your organization.

The Customer Collaboration suite of resources will establish or expand the foundation for an improved customer experience. We already touched on how SocialMiner offers support for customer interactivity in this recent blog post. But additional products like the Unified Contact Center and the Customer Voice Portal will help increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by offering sophisticated call routing, contact management and speech-enabled self-service capabilities. In addition, they can provide an alternative to the mostly reactive mode of traditional call centers while helping you build a platform that supports engagement and proactively with your customers.

Cisco’s multiple options for TelePresence add a component that brings attendees face to face even if they’re in different offices. This suite of products offers a new way to support collaboration through high-quality video conferencing. By embracing TelePresence to support collaboration your organization can reduce travel costs, speed up decision making and provide highly engaged service for customers and partners. The systems also offer interoperability based on the industry standards meaning less support will be required from your IT team to assist with connecting to customers, suppliers and partners who are running on different types of systems or networks.

Then you can add in their Unified Communications solutions to make sure that what we discussed above runs effectively over a single converged network. This suite of products helps extend collaboration by offering reliable communications support for delivering multiple applications like voice, video and presence services to various types of devices and IP endpoints. It also addresses the growing need to support mobility at an enterprise level. Implementing Cisco’s Unified Communications platform allows you to view, optimize, and manage the entire communications system from one screen.

Each of these tools will enable your team to work together more efficiently, build new channels to communicate with customers and improve the way your organization communicates. We’ll provide a more in-depth look at each of the solutions individually in future blog posts to provide a better understanding of the platforms Cisco offers to support collaboration.

Corporate use of video has become increasingly popular over the past few years.  Businesses are embracing it to promote their offerings to customers, train their workforce and increase visibility for their organization. If implemented effectively this platform provides an additional channel to connect with your stakeholders. If it isn’t rolled out strategically or by a strong business partner it just becomes an investment in technology that is underutilized.

Cisco has done a good job of addressing the need for enterprise video with their Digital Media Suite. The offering includes a comprehensive suite of webcasting and video sharing applications. Specific resources like Digital Signage, Cast and Show and Share can help transform how organizations learn, communicate, collaborate and grow.

Briefly, Digital Signage is a network-based application used to deliver information and training to digital signage. Cast delivers live video, on-demand video and broadcast TV channels over IP to digital displays. Show and Share is a webcasting and video sharing application for creating secure video communities to share ideas and expertise to a variety of devices.

Here are a few of the benefits the Digital Media Suite can deliver to your business:
-Improves communications by establishing a cost-effective and secure platform for creating, editing, uploading, searching and displaying digital media.
-Integrates with existing infrastructure and networking components.
-Provides training to geographically dispersed employees, customers, and partners while saving money on travel costs.
-Expands revenue opportunities by establishing new resources for product promotion and advertising.
-Facilitates collaboration allowing organizations to increase productivity, accelerate time to market, enable quicker decision making and promote sharing of expertise.

For technology managers the Digital Media Suite enables your team to create, manage and access content for a variety of applications from a single platform. The Digital Media Encoders (DMEs) capture the video from a variety of inputs and encode it into the popular digital formats for delivery across an IP network. Then the Digital Media Manager (DMM) allows your IT team to manage content and approval flows, create playlists and schedule video delivery. The content your users create can then be accessed by multiple devices using Show and Share or delivered to digital displays via Digital Signs.

Digital media offers a compelling platform for adding personalization and immediacy to your organization’s communications with stakeholders. Contact us to learn more about how these technologies can help you establish real-time and on-demand channels for sharing expertise, information, news and training.