It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged about the hospitality industry, although I always pay attention to the telephony infrastructure (Ok, the phones in the room and behind the front desk) wherever I stay. I’ve seen a lot. There is a lot of old Nortel out there, particularly as they had a hand hold in the hospitality industry early on, for example. But more and more I’m seeing newer, higher end phone sets in rooms, along with newer entertainment options as well.

Last July Mitel announced that the JW Marriott Indianapolis had selected and deployed Mitel’s Unified Communications solution based on its Freedom architecture. Mitel’s UC solution is a pure IP voice infrastructure spanning all 33 floors and over 1000 guest rooms, as well as the adjunct 104,000 square feet of convention space. The hotel has used this infrastructure to give guests new services not possible before, such as web-based information and other services on the phones in the rooms, as well as mobility options for guests.

When I was at the Cisco Collaboration Summit in Miami earlier this month I got to take part in a site visit of JW Marriott Marquis and Hotel Beaux Arts in Miami. This is a unique hotel from the perspective that it is a Marriott on the lower part, and an embedded smaller hotel on the 39^th floor. It is also technologically unique as well. Cisco, along with partner Modcomp, used the Cisco Connected Hotels framework to combine 12 Cisco technologies to deliver guest services, including physical safety, Medianet, video and collaboration.

The hotel has the most pervasive and creative uses of video I’ve ever seen in a hotel.  Up in the ballroom, which can double as a basketball or tennis court, is the biggest video board in the world, at 450 feet, made up of 52 inch Cisco LCD Professional Series display boards. This screen is amazing and multi-use. A basketball team could show replays, corporate events could show video presentations, etc. I could think of all sorts of uses. What came to my mind were those embarrassing childhood videos that brides and grooms sometimes torture each other with at weddings. But Cisco took this idea farther by saying that guests could use video devices to record and stream video during or after the wedding/reception. I don’t know about this one.

The hotel has video signage throughout the building for guest services, Cisco IP phones with video-enabled screens, and a TelePresence concierge in the lobby. The latter is almost a test case on how to introduce TelePresence to the mass market. They have positioned the board at some distance away from registration. However, during peak hours when there can be a line, those in the back of the line could have the opportunity to interact with a life-size video concierge that can show them restaurants options, Google Maps, menus, etc. The hotel says that they will be placing a printer there shortly so that guests can print out things such as Google Maps and directions.

For guests, there are wired and wireless options, including being assigned a wireless IP phone in their room, which they can take with them throughout the property. Guests have the option of using TelePresence rooms for meetings, can also request a mobile video concierge so that they can interact with a concierge without leaving a meeting room.  Once in their rooms, guests have multiple options of services on the phones, and the hotel has used the same for targeted advertising to guests. For example, during a slow time in the spa, they might put an ad on the phone with a discount during a specific time period that the person can get by mentioning a code on the display, or perhaps get a free drink or appetizer in the restaurant.

Finally, Cisco also took too care with security by using Cisco Physical Access Control, and Cisco IP Video Surveillance technology, coupled with Cisco Emergency Responder for 911 calls. This was really a great hotel, and don’t even start me on how nice the rooms were. I didn’t want to leave.

Tags: Collaboration, Mobile UC, Video by Nancy Jamison
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UC and CEBP Can Provide Fast, Secure Communications

Health care activities have long been recognized as a big target for UC flexibility, particularly for mobile end users and for personalized automated notifications. However, a recent announcement by the health care industry’s Joint Commission showed the potential for another way UC-enabled applications can play a key role for convenient and efficient contacts.

The Joint Commission stated that texting medical orders directly is not acceptable because of authentication and record keeping requirements. Needless to say, the convenience of using mobile smartphones and tablets would be limited. However, while person-to-person texting is prohibited, person-to-process-to-person should be acceptable, and that’s where Mobile UC flexibility and CEBP come into play.

The doctor who wishes to initiate a medical order can simply do so through a mobile app that first requires secure access and authentication, including a written signature or voice ID if necessary. The order can be input as speech or typed, and then becomes a text message that is then deliverable to authorized recipients, which can include hospitals, pharmacies, and the specific patient. The voice recording of an order is also useful for validating a record of the medical order.

The patient involved can be immediately notified and have access to a copy of an order to be aware of what will be done and to quickly follow up with timely usage of any medications involved.

Doesn’t that look like a multi-modal UC application to you?

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility by Art Rosenberg
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In my ‘Happy Birthday, Cisco TelePresence’ blog last month, I wrote about the latest and greatest Telepresence offerings Cisco introduced near the five-year anniversary of the birth of the first TelePresence product. To recap, the first two parts of the announcement were a vertical market application for healthcare called Cisco VX-Clinical Assistant, a number of new TelePresence endpoints, including the Cisco Jabber^TM Video for TelePresence; a standards-based, HD video-calling software application that allows participants to join TelePresence calls from their desktop PCs or laptops, and Cisco TelePresence MX300; Cisco’s newest multi-purpose, room-based TelePresence system, that supports nine people in a room.

The third part of last month’s announcement was the extension of TelePresence into the SMB market with the introduction of Cisco TelePresence Callway, a hosted service that is part of the Cisco Collaboration Cloud. Even though Cisco talked about how the four pillars are mobile, social, visual and virtual, the combination of video and the cloud were the two central themes I took away from annual Cisco Collaboration Summit, held last week in Miami, Florida.

Murali Sitaram, VP /GM of the Collaboration Software Group, gave a presentation on “Cloud Collaboration in the Post PC-Era”. Snorre Kjesbu, VP/GM of the TelePresence Technology Group, and Hakon Dahle, VP/CTO of the TelePresence Technology Group presented “Delivering on the Promise of Video Everywhere”.  We also listened to a very entertaining panel of Cisco executives talk about “Managing and Securing Collaboration in the Cloud”, as well, backed up by a breakout session on “The New Role of Video”, with multiple executives fielding our questions.

Barry O’Sullivan, Senior VP/GM of the Collaboration and Communication Group, started off the summit by talking about the cloud, and stated that WebEx is now the second largest business SaaS application out there with 500M users. Barry then spoke about the announcement of the next generation of WebEx, which extends the experience of the meeting to before and after the meeting. The idea is that users do work before and after meetings, related to those meetings, and this work would be far more effective and efficient, if attendees could have a persistent meeting space where they could file share documents from a desktop or file store, to get ready for the meeting, and leave that meeting “essentially open” for any updates after the meeting.

In Murali’s presentation he outlined a vision of how users collaborate now that we have so many device options and collaboration tools other than just our desktop. As he put it, “we consume experiences, documents, etc. and we do it across multiple devices. The cloud fundamentally enables this world that we live in, which is mobile, social, visual and virtual. The user device is like a piece of glass with the intelligence higher up.” So following up on this concept of a persistent meeting, the idea is to make meetings more expressive and meaningful.  There is knowledge in each meeting that needs to be conveyed to the next one.  With a persistent meeting space you can prepare by scheduling, posting the agenda and meeting materials, meet through video and sharing, on the device of your choice, and then follow up by sharing, continuing the discussion, watching recordings and tracking progress.

We also heard and saw a lot on Cisco Quad, and using Quad to create neighborhoods where employees can work. One demo showed how a vendor could collaborate using WebEx, and we were shown how Cisco has worked on getting the user interface between the Quad and WebEx to look very similar, including sharing a common activity stream. There is also now a history feed in the activity stream, added through the assets brought in from Cisco’s acquisition of Versely. In addition to the history feed, the demo also showed a widget that allows a pop up for an approval on part of the project, chat to get project approval, and then a video popped up via Callway. An additional party was using Telepresence through VXE, and another one was brought in using Jabber client on an iPad.

It is hard to encapsulate two days of Cisco collaboration into a few paragraphs. I’ll just say that from where Cisco was five years ago with the introduction of TelePresence, to the variety of tools and applications in collaboration, including video, that they now have available for users of all company sizes and types, and how they are integrating them, and delivering them is truly impressive.

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Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic:

• Cisco Collaboration Summit - What’s UC?, (UCStrategies Views article) by Jon Arnold
• Cisco Continues to Help Customers Transform Their Business, (UCStrategies Views article) by Blair Pleasant
• Cisco Helps Companies Transform Business, (video podcast) by Blair Pleasant
• Cisco Getting Serious About Developers, (UCStrategies Views article) by David Yedwab
• UCStrategies Experts Discuss the Cisco Collaboration Summit, (Industry Buzz podcast) by Blair Pleasant

Tags: Collaboration, Unified Communications, Video by Nancy Jamison
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UC Interoperability - Technology “Separation of Church, State, and End Users”

Unified Communications (UC)-enabled applications must be supported in various ways and “interoperability,” a loose term being used to describe a major challenge (see No Jiitter post by Fred Knight) in supporting UC’s operational growth. For many providers of UC applications and services, interoperability simply means getting old and new communications applications integrated to work together at various levels, including network access, application user interfaces, and endpoint device form factors and operating systems. However, every organization will also have to consider interoperability as a means of gracefully transitioning from the past to the future. This will not only be a challenge in transitioning operational communications technologies, but also a challenge to the future role of an organization in controlling access to both its information resources and its communications between people (internal staff, customers, and business partners).

Business communications (particularly voice telephony) are transitioning away from hardware-based, location-based technologies to “open” software and “virtual” applications that can more easily interoperate with each other. They are also shifting to application-driven real-time notifications and multimedia self-services rather than requiring person-to-person phone calls for real-time information access and delivery. Bottom line is that traditional requirements for enterprise communication control is expanding away from just the wired premise desktop to multimodal, mobile BYOD devices that will be primarily controlled by the individual end users through UC and shared for the many different contacts with other organizations that the individual end user has “business” relations with.

These technology shifts would suggest that much of yesterday’s real-time, voice-only desktop telephony requirements will be significantly reduced in favor of multimedia user interfaces, asynchronous forms of personalized contact, and real-time mobile notifications, with the option of “click-to-call/talk/video” connectivity based on accessibility and availability (presence). End users will be initiating voice conversations differently and managing responses to such contacts differently than traditional call management.

So, the basic question really is how will that transition take place from the perspective of enterprise technology? Will it shift (slowly or quickly) completely or partially (hybrid) to virtual cloud based IP network services that can satisfy application customization, management, and security needs? That’s where standards and interoperability become key and both the industry and the markets still have “one foot on land and one foot in the canoe!”

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility, Unified Communications by Art Rosenberg
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The big news in business communications is that IBM is supporting its employees use of their own mobile devices (smartphones, tablets), while focusing on secure access to internal information. By the end of the this year, 100,000 IBM employees will be able to securely access IBM internal networks with their own devices and network services that will also be used for personal applications and entertainment (dual persona). In 2012, another 100,000 employees will also be BYOD enabled.

Employees will be paying for their own devices and will require loading IBM management software for security purposes. In addition, IBM will require passwords and use VPNs for access to information applications. Initially, IBM will provide contact and calendar access through its Lotus Traveler.

In addition to allowing employees to use public mobile apps, IBM will also provide approved third-party and internal apps from its Whirlwind app store, launched in late 2010.

IBM’s move to BYOD will expand the role of UC for its mobile users, enabling both person-to-person contact flexibility and CEBP notifications from time-sensitive applications. IBM’s BYOD policy  is setting an example for large organizations to migrate their legacy telephony business communications to a more cost efficient and productive virtual and mobile UC environment.

See article

Tags: Mobile UC by Art Rosenberg
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