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This week while preparing for FETC 2015, I thought back to an article that Education Week published in December on digital content delivery and interoperability. With E-Learning software topping most educator’s shopping lists this year, interoperability is bound to be one of the many hot discussion topics heard on the exhibit floors during the show. So, I thought it might be a good idea to revisit the article here.

A handful of large school districts (like Houston Independent School District) have begun aggressively pushing big publishers of education-based digital content to begin revamping the way they deliver instructional materials—a movement which will upend the long-established purchasing patterns that typically keep educators from accessing materials from other vendors.

The movement is reminiscent of several interoperability debates in the IT/Tech world right now, and we’re seeing many school districts lead the charge in declaring that they will not do business with publishers who refuse to become interoperable.

It’s a huge step on the part of the school districts. A shift towards interoperability means many things. It can revolutionize how content-delivery systems interact with each other. It could also transform how schools purchase and consume digital content, allowing districts to procure small "chunks" of content (individual chapters, lessons or videos, for example) from multiple vendors, perhaps through licensing agreements, rather than rely on yearlong or grade-span textbook series from a single publisher.

Finding Interoperability

As FETC helps kick off trade show season and as school districts start moving into 2015, it may be time to begin evaluating content technologies that can easily manage both the interoperable content coming from publishers as well as any other content types/formats.

Here are a few things to look for as you begin to evaluate new content distribution platforms:

“Create-ivity” and Customizability

Content distribution platforms (a.k.a. Learning Management Systems) traditionally employ a structured sequential learning method that drives students to move through class material in a predefined order. The best interoperable technologies are going to offer more by way of on-demand flexibility—letting teachers either create or select content relevant to each student’s learning experience, helping achieve the best possible results in the classroom.

A fully interoperable, flexible content management and distribution solution should give professors and students the option to employ either a traditional sequential learning model or the ability create a truly customized learning experience by accessing individual content pieces in multiple formats (video, presentation, documents, etc.) that the school has either licensed from multiple publishers or created on its own.

Collaboration and Interactivity

There is an increased focus on collaboration in higher education in order to prepare students for today’s collaborative and adaptive work environments. The right Learning Management System should provide the social interaction to which students have become accustomed, and should include tools that allow students and teachers to create discussion feeds and workgroups for classroom-based conversations and project-based learning.

Today’s Learning Management Systems should allow students to work collaboratively and efficiently together in real-time to complete class assignments and projects, and also include tools that allow interactive experiences with the course content,  including online components and hybrid learning strategies for flipped-classroom style learning.

“Integrate-ability” and Modernity

There are many challenges facing educators as classroom technology continues to advance.  That’s why a content distribution platform should be easy to use, should integrate existing educational resources, and should be integrate-able with your existing district technologies (think Unified Communications solutions, virtualized or cloud storage systems, or analytics technologies).

Collaborative Content Management

School districts like Houston’s are drawing lines in the sand—demanding more from the publishers creating K-12 content. The same demands will now need to be made of the technologists creating the distribution solutions.

That said, NEC is going to be at FETC this week demoing several of our education solutions—including our Collaborative Content Management solution, a cloud-based Learning Management System which is fully interoperable, flexible, and collaborative right out of the box.

If you’d like to learn more about NEC’s Collaborative Content Management before the show, check out our webinar below.

If you happen to be at FETC this week, stop by booth #1268 to chat with an NEC expert during normal Expo hours.

 

With all the negative reporting around economic recoveries, it’s always nice to hear a little good news. Each year, hoteliers around the world see larger chunks of money spent on travel. In 2013, Americans spent 887.9 billion dollars on travel alone, with about 19% of that total going directly to lodging.

All of the money pouring into the travel industry means the hospitality market is changing. Increasing levels of competition should have hoteliers rethinking the business strategies that retain existing clientele, and fighting harder to capture the attention of potential new customers.

It's important to note that, if you’re implementing new initiatives to improve customer loyalty, missteps, or ignoring customer demands altogether, can and will drive guests away from your business. Take Wi-Fi as an example. Studies are increasingly showing that most travelers demand free and fast Wi-Fi wherever they book a room, yet 1/3 of current U.S. hotels still do not offer free Wi-Fi access. 

You don't want to be the one hotel out there that doesn't provide the expected service. Your customers will go to your competitors who are willing to offer what has become the standard.

From an IT and technology perspective, the “expected” service in most hotels is a network that’s always-on.

To stay with the times, you don't need just to play catch up with your competitors; you need to stay ahead of the game. Here are three tips to help you avoid downtime and keep your network in tip-top shape.

Tip 1: Manage Goodwill

It isn't enough that your hotel is equipped with top-of-the-line technologies and services if you can’t deliver them to your guests—which means you’ll have to keep your IT systems functioning 24 hours a day, seven days a week to maintain happy clientele.

What you may not know, though, is that every time your system goes down, you lose money—a lot of money. A study released by CA Technologies reveals that North American businesses, including those within the hospitality sector, collectively lose as much as $26.5 billion in revenue every year due to slow recovery from IT system downtime, equating a reduction in the average business's ability to generate revenue by 29 percent. 

While it's true that you can't always prevent service outages, you can manage goodwill by ensuring that:

1. Unnecessary outages are avoided.
2. And, the right plans are in place to improve the speed of recovery when outages do occur.

Tip 2: Be Proactive Against Downtime

In our globally-connected world, the expectation for reliable communications has never been greater. Dropped calls and limited access services can lead to poor reviews and a damaged reputation for most businesses. But for Hospitality-based businesses specifically who specialize in housing conferences and business meetings, where Wi-Fi, digital signage, automated services, and other guest amenities will be needed consistently, a dropped call or garbled voice mail can translate into a lot of lost business. 

The solution here is to begin employing high-availability communications solutions. Modern communications systems give your guests the instant access they need to internal and external services. But, the advantages recouped from UC are tenfold for hotel personnel. For your employees, UC means enhanced voice, video, and web collaboration, and access to colleagues anytime from anywhere on any mobile-enabled device. 

Tip 3: Employ Remote Monitoring

Running high-availability, always-on IT solutions can be stressful for any organization—regardless of size. Employing the staff needed to keep things functioning during normal periods, and the cost of hiring onsite maintenance technicians during emergencies can be costly, especially for hospitality-based businesses that often have hotels in multiple locations.

Remote management services can be financially beneficial for organizations with distributed properties but centralized IT. Remote management can help reduce onsite IT visits by as much as 80 percent and virtually eliminating the need to hire expensive onsite IT staff during emergencies. But the biggest benefit of remote monitoring is both the ultimate decrease in your system's outages and downtime, and faster recovery when the system does go down.

Why? Because the third party staff, equipment, and application monitoring that comes with most remote monitoring services are available on a 24/7 basis and are capable of detecting things like compromised voice quality or availability issues as soon as they occur, well before your guests report them to you. This means there’s no overlap between the time the system goes down and the time someone discovers that the system has gone down—maintenance can be started and your most important guest services can be restored almost immediately.

Upgrading Your Communications Solution

Giving your guests highly available, reliable, always-on IT services does not have to be as stressful or costly as it may seem right now. It is worth noting that, with the increasing demand to replace outdated communications, there’s a chance that the bulk of your problems  and potential risk lie within your old outdated hardware.

Take a look at your network system and consider these tips. If you have a problem that hasn’t been solved here, give us a call. It may be time for an upgrade to a more reliable Unified Communications Hospitality oriented communications system.

Digital Publishing is a contentious subject among educators. The transition between paper and digital has created gray areas and thoughts/opinions on the transformation to digital range widely and evolve consistently. With the kick-off of the 2014 EDUCAUSE Conference under way it's a good time to take a look at the arguments presented. Do we burn the textbook? Does digital serve a higher purpose?

Digital vs. Print Publishing

Until November 2007 when Amazon introduced the Kindle, the only viable means of book distribution was paper. Any author who wanted to reach a mass audience needed a paper distribution partner. Any author could hire his or her own editor and his or her own cover design artist; he or she could even hire a printing press to create the actual books. The one service he or she couldn't hire out was distribution. And publishers didn't offer distribution as an a-la-carte service. The package service was always the best value, and there was no viable alternative otherwise.

In textbook publishing, there has been little alternative to buying a traditional book from the publishers—particularly in Higher Education. Each professor expects their students to have access to the required text. Knowing that professors require specific texts, publishers are able to control the market (in an effort to stop borrowing and downloading illegal versions, etc.). They do this by publishing “updated” editions to their texts fairly frequently. It’s an effort on their part to “force” students to buy new textbooks—whether the content needs refreshing or not. 

Textbook costs increased an average of 186 percent from 1986 to 2005—a jump that saw several students dropping out of college simply because they couldn’t afford the books they needed for classes. Digital publishing clearly posed a solution to the issue and has pushed the industry ever-closer to its tipping point.

Major publishers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few years buying up software companies and building new digital divisions, betting that the future will bring an expanded role for digital publishers in higher education.

So far, publishers are only producing a limited number of titles in these born-digital formats, and the number of professors assigning them is relatively small. Only about 2 percent of textbooks sold at college bookstores are fully digital titles, according to a survey of 940 bookstores run by Follett Higher Education Group.

As these new kinds of textbooks catch on, they raise questions about how much control publishers have over curriculum and the teaching process. It seems that the time has come for a different publishing model, and with it, real disruption.

Colleges as Publishers

Publishers shouldn’t be the only organizations building these new textbooks. In fact, the most qualified organizations to be writing said texts are colleges themselves.

Modern digital content management technologies can help universities not only transition from print to digital, but can also help the transition into self-publishing as well. Implementation is always key when it comes to new technology and, particularly with digital publishing, rash or jumpy behavior can kill the vision before it’s realized.

Preparing appropriate digital initiatives, trainings, and continued professional development are all essential to creating buy-in and getting users to feel comfortable using the content management technology to begin creating digitally powered course curricula.  But the payoff is definitely worth it.

 Self-publishing is great for universities and students alike. With universities as publishers, Higher Ed institutions start regaining control of the content used in their courses. Additional benefits include new revenue streams and the ability to provide students much better rates for books than students were able to get on their own, even for used textbooks.

Plus, with the right technology, those who wanted to read the textbook on paper could print out the electronic version or pay an additional fee to buy an old-fashioned copy—a book.

Communication, Collaboration, and Reciprocity

In readying myself for the conference, I had the opportunity to read The Other End of the Scale: Re-Thinking the Digital Experience in Higher Education on the EDUCAUSE Review. The article is full of conversation-starters, but one key message stood out.

“It is time to rethink the digital experience in higher education: we have a chance not only to reimagine our encounters with the large scale but also to embrace our opportunities at the other end of the scale.”

The move to digital learning has been defined by the “rhetoric of openness,” meaning the success or failure of any digital movement in higher-education is going to depend on collaboration—between faculty, students, and IT professionals. The same can be said of digital publishing. Failure on the part of textbook publishers to advance digital publishing could be attributed to the lack of collaboration between the publishers and the institutions, as well as the institutions and the students in order to determine which digital texts work properly and which don’t.

Improved communications are often a key factor in facilitating this type of collaboration. Continuing to ask “what kind of engagement do we want from our students,” and simultaneously, “how are they engaging with us now,” can help create the communicative foundation universities need to be able to collaborate properly with students.  

As the landscape of learning continues to grow and change, and more of our communications become mobile, institutions will need to be able to provide easy, immediate access to all forms of communication on all devices.

Rather than using an old communications system that requires University IT departments to support each device individually, wouldn’t it make sense to employ an agnostic system—something that can be tailored to different users, and one that can be re-used repeatedly?

A Unified Communications-enabled solution can be that device agnostic system for which you’re looking. Not only can it effectively tie professors, students, and faculty together across devices, it can also simultaneously create a recurring revenue model for your institution—licenses can “rented” and then easily re-used as students graduate.

The technologies that will be most successful, however, are those that can combine the collaboration and digital publishing features to provide one, self-sustaining, self-informing communications solution. A collaborative content management system can centralize all processes  and give universities one location from which students can get all requisite information and content,  can access university-oriented social sharing/collaboration tools, and can be directly connected with faculty and professors through advanced UC functionality.

A collaborative content management system can effectively tie everything together, giving universities total control so students and teachers can continue making the same sort of epistemological advances that are today, made in the traditional classroom with the traditional textbook.

To learn more about Collaborative Content Management, check out our webinar and demo recording below. If you happen to be at EDUCAUSE this week, stop by booth 709 to chat with an NEC expert during normal Expo hours.

BYOD and BYOA: How Devices and Apps Function Together to Improve Business Productivity and Employee Efficiency

Mobile devices are completely ingrained in our daily lives. They entertain, remind, socialize, and manage us. They are our personal authentication key to the world around us. They are an extension of ourselves. Handheld mobile devices are just extremely personal, more so than any other device we interact with during the day. When asked, most people will say that they’ll give up food or sleep before they’re deprived of their mobile device, and for most there is a discernable level of anxiety when their device isn’t actively with them.

BYOD: The Device is King

The personal dynamics of mobile devices and, in turn, mobile device management, has made adoption of mobile technology a tricky business across the board. For most organizations, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies are still complex and perceived as risky. But, with the global workforce’s rapid adoption of the mobile work style, integration of BYOD policies have been necessary for most organizations to maintain the high levels of productivity needed to sustain business success. In fact, only businesses with high-level security concerns and strict privacy needs—like financial organizations—can succeed in today’s marketplace without some form of acceptance of BYOD in their mobile policies.

Originally, the largest motivation for BYOD was the desire to get rid of the traditional corporate device and its restrictive user experience which contrasted sharply against the newer, smarter consumer devices providing more personal experiences. The result for many early BYOD adopters was the increased employee satisfaction, productivity, and improved competitive advantage that they were searching for.

We’ve talked about BYOD for what seems like too long, but it continues to be a hot topic as employers allow employees to utilize their own devices at the office. But, as many of us know, giving employee-owned devices access to the corporate network increases risk and is difficult for businesses to manage. Many IT departments don’t have the time to deal with the challenges inherent with BYOD; the co-existence of personal and business data, multiple operating systems, and problems with backup, recovery, security, and compliance.

In fact, the 2014 Executive Enterprise Mobility Report released by Apperian and conducted by CITO Research, helps shed some light on how important the issues are that executives at a range of companies embracing these mobility strategies face.

For example, 77% of the respondents highlighted security as a major concern with mobile device management—not much of a shocking discovery if you’ve ever dealt with mobility in the past. What is shocking? That 70% of respondents are still unable to detect data or device loss, which highlights a starteling lack of mobile security initiative in today's businesses despite security being a key concern.

What is clear, is that companies understand the inherent risk surrounding BYOD and many are still struggling with how best to address their concerns.

Some of the challenges of managing BYOD programs have re-invigorated a “bring-your-own” trend that dates back to the 1980s—Bring Your Own Apps (BYOA). BYOA can be used as a way to preserve the productivity benefits of BYOD while reducing the capital costs associated with managing a BYOD program.

BYOA: The App is Queen

The BYOA trend centers on employees’ use of third-party applications in the workplace. But BYOA is really the key driver of a much larger trend that's growing in popularity; IT consumerization. Why? Because BYOA and its associated benefits for employees include greater engagement and satisfaction, and improved productivity, the chief cornerstone of the IT Consumerization movement.

Since BYOA employees choose their own applications, each employee can use the apps that he or she is most comfortable with. Not only does this improve productivity by allowing employees to have more control over the software they use, it also enhances efficiency by letting each individual person use the tool that best matches their work style. This gives you the opportunity to provide more software and business process features to your team than you could logically provide while employing a BYOD or other corporate mobility strategy. IT Consumerization essentially allows businesses to create endless opportunities with multiple new ways to get work done—which would likely have a positive effect in terms of employee morale and efficacy.

But the greatest strengths of the BYOA policy are also its greatest weaknesses.

Most consumer apps being used in the enterprise are cloud-based in order to allow user access from multiple devices, laptops included. Many organizations are finding that the combination of cloud-based document sharing and cloud-based business process solutions are meeting a growing number of their business requirements.

As employees are increasingly under pressure to do more with less in terms of budget and IT resources, they often turn to BYOA to get the job done. While this can be rationalized as a means of reducing the capital expenditures and licensing costs associated with using corporate-issued file storage, document sharing, and business process software, all budgetary benefits that come from reducing capital costs are often negated because of one thing—sacrificed security. Your prized corporate data is now sitting in someone else’s cloud.

There is no ace in the hole when it comes to security policies. The simple fact is that SMBs must absorb certain types of risk out of necessity when competing with large enterprises—which is why you’re likely to see higher BYOA adoption among SMBs than enterprises.

But for those who can’t absorb that risk, or simply don’t want to, there’s good news—that risk can be managed.

Security and Mobility: Striking Common Ground

The key challenges for businesses of all sizes adopting cloud and mobility applications is finding the right balance between usability and data security. In an ideal world, users would like to have one-click access to an increasing number of apps without needing 12 digit passwords for each app. Since users are bringing in their own devices, and these devices are the primary means to app access, they must be “trusted” within the organization and secured.

“Perimeter Security” no longer exists in the enterprise. Network boundaries are slowly disappearing—and many IT departments are still trying to control all facets of off-premises application access from roaming mobile endpoints. But this is, quite simply, impossible to do. And so a shift in the way we think about security may be in order.

Protecting data directly, not the device, guards your data at the source rather than the endpoint, ensuring the safety of your businesses’ information regardless of your employee’s location. Information Rights Management and other such technologies directly embed access rules into documents by way of cryptography. With this method, the rules are applicable to documents regardless of location or device, allowing effective security measures for multi-device environments.

This pattern also allows for “detecting, logging, and blocking” data that leaves enterprise premises. Having the capability to follow the transmission of sensitive data solves part of the problem that has become apparent in Apperian’s Mobility report—understanding where, when, and how users are transferring information out of the corporate network.

Secondly, the drive to demand better security from consumer app providers needs to be spearheaded by SMB and enterprise businesses. Since most businesses are embracing some form of BYOD/BYOA, and most of us spend at least 40 hours a week in the workplace, the burden of changing app security—and consequently cloud stability—really falls on businesses, not consumers.

Finally, securing critical business communications can solve a lot of data leakage from the start. Unified Communications (UC) can help keep your company keep its contacts and other data safe and secure when an employee’s device is lost or stolen.

With the right UC app, your IT administrator can secure data loss easily. Unified Communications lets employees bring their own devices while still maintaining high levels of corporate security. The best UC platforms let you support multiple devices through one single approved UC app, meaning your employees can have access to their favorite communications tools without your IT department having to support each device individually.

In regard to other security issues, many organizations that have started implementing consumerization policies are establishing acceptable use standards for use of consumer technologies in the workplace. Acceptable use policies (AUP) stipulate requirements that must be followed to be granted network access.

To learn more about how BYOD policies empower smart enterprises, along with other trends impacting the workforce, download the Smart Enterprise Trends eBook.

Recently, there have been stories hitting the news about the ability to call 911 from phones in hotels. Do you have to dial a 9 for an outside line first? Or can you just dial 911 straight away? These are questions that the public is asking hoteliers to answer.

The ability to access emergency services by dialing 911 is a vital component of public safety and emergency preparedness. The history of 911 and VoIP phones is confusing at best. As legislation has started changing, Enhanced 911 (E911) capabilities have become standard on smart, modern VoIP systems.

Currently, only 17 states currently have E911 legislation enacted. Most states still do not require VoIP vendors, or businesses using VoIP services, to provide E911 dialing capabilities.

The legal confusion and the intricacies of programming have made adoption of certain kinds of VoIP technology difficult and a bit unpopular for hospitality organizations intending to provide easy access to emergency services for their customers. While hotels can currently nominate a single trunk to provide 911 dialing services, the growing adoption and the need for hospitality organizations to have hosted telephony solutions or managed services has brought the E911 discussion back into focus.

The success of an E911 implementation relies on your hotel’s technology professionals understanding of how E911 works. We’ve written this post to help you assess your current risk and build a budget that prepares you for installation, maintenance, or upgrade costs.

E911’s History with Public Safety

VoIP is a much more flexible telephony option than land line phone service. But the confusion around 911 dialing has, for a few years, aggravated hoteliers and customers, often leading to trepidation about upgrading to more modern systems. Dispelling the trepidation is key to successful adoption of VoIP in hospitality based industries, which is important because modern telephony systems provide many new technologies and features that hoteliers and customers will love.

If you look at VoIP history, you’ll find that initially, dialing a 9 before the complete telephone number was required to get an outside line on large PBX systems. So in the past, you had to dial 9 to get outside. The technology required it. So at that time the only option callers had was to dial a 9+911.

And on older phone systems, or on phone systems that haven’t been programmed properly, this could still be the case; a fact that has created tragedies in situations when the standard convention directs the user to dial 911 in an emergency.  

Modern IP phones have been upgraded to include dialing capabilities for 911 and 9+911.

But they have to be programmed appropriately to be able to do it—which requires a qualified technician.

Assessing your Risk

The liabilities exposed by E911 are multi-faceted. All enterprises must evaluate their footprint in states with legislation and assess their tolerance for risk related to applicable legal liabilities. Additionally, the impetus for E911 legislation continues to build, with additional states passing E911 statutes each year. Enterprises need to continue to comply with statutes in each state, because non–compliance in these states could provide proof of negligence (negligence per se) in an exigent situation. Even in those states without such statutes, failure to implement E911 technology appropriately or at all may be hard to justify with the technology so readily available with modern IP systems.

Explaining to your workforce or other stakeholders why E911 has not been implemented properly after a catastrophic event could cause irreparable damage to workplace morale, productivity, and public perception.  

The risk assessment process has two basic parts: technical assessment and policy/procedures assessment. Methods used to assess are:

• Penetration Tests /Vulnerability Scans—tests your system security
• Security Policy Compliance—tests  your organization’s compliance within its own security policy
• Legal Compliance—assess your compliance with your state’s E911 laws
• Best Practices Assessment—determines if your policies and technology are aligned with the best practices at comparable institutions

While internal security teams can perform a risk assessment, it's often prudent to contract an independent party to conduct the evaluation. Outside auditors bring their breadth of knowledge and experience from working with other companies.

Building a Budget for E911

Building support inside your organization to implement an E911 initiative or even to get buy-in on a maintenance plan is an important task. There are multiple stakeholders within your organization that will be affected in some way by the E911 project, and it is important to explain everything to them, and identify how E911 will affect them.

These stakeholders typically include:

• Front Office
• Housekeeping
• Uniformed Services
• Food and Beverage
• Maintenance

Fortunately, there are E911 solutions for every budget. The best place to start is often basic research. Consider the size of your business and the complexity of your phone network. Remember the following when starting to plan for an implementation, upgrade, or maintenance:

1. Take your time and include your team. A budget is not the forecast you put together on the weekend. It must be the result of coordinated input and effort by you and your management team.
2. Don't try to budget to the last penny. Accurately predicting actual results is not the objective. It's all about giving your company a direction to use as a jumping off point, and then later for course corrections—providing details on the financial points that matter most.
3. Make the tradeoffs when necessary. You have a finite amount of resources available to you. The same can be said for VoIP providers. All communications solutions have their strengths, but vendors cannot provide every single tool that’s available in the whole market. Prepare your budget with the knowledge that you might not have access to the tool you want, but can use that budget to finance a tool that maybe you didn’t plan for.  Most importantly, this discipline will keep you from overspending. But, it will also remind you to assess each vendor’s strengths as a whole—and not based on the one or two applications they cannot provide.

This approach ensures that you get the support you need, which is the key to the success of your project. Once you’ve budgeted, you can begin assessing vendors. We find that most hotels benefit most from highly redundant software solutions.

Next week we’ll be at the 2014 Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition and Conference (HITEC), most comprehensive showcase of hospitality technology in the world.

There we’ll be unveiling the second half of our post, which covers E911 programming and modern hospitality communications technologies.

If you’d like more information on becoming E911 capable, stop by booth 827 so that NEC Hospitality experts can answer your questions.

Modernizing IT infrastructure and becoming a Smarter Enterprise

The need for modernization among IT departments is a trend that is becoming increasingly relevant as IT departments are constantly faced with generational shifts in technology. The pressures of modern business require that IT departments close the gap between yesterday’s IT implementations and tomorrow’s demands.

Organizations that fail to modernize will rapidly lose their ability to respond to changing customer needs. They will weaken their competitive positions in the marketplace. And most importantly, the gap between where they are and need to be will only widen, leading to an expensive and uncertain future.

With most businesses facing incredibly tight or shrinking IT budgets, taking the appropriate steps toward modernization will seem expensive. With a modernized platform, however, organizations can add new capabilities and enhance overall employee performance while reducing their electronic footprint, leading to increased savings over time.

What is a Smart Enterprise?

Smart enterprises leverage more converged IT technologies to optimize business practices, drive workforce engagement, and create a competitive edge. Merely leveraging a converged IT framework in your IT department means that you are on your way to operating a smarter, more efficient business. IT organizations can utilize four key areas of value and then assess their plan against:

1: Business Agility

Today, most workforces are mobile. As such, your applications and enterprise architecture should empower these mobile workforces. Creating a more adaptive and more programmable infrastructure will enable IT to be more responsive to your organization. Businesses in today’s world are always on, and as a result, you need to consider how your most critical services can adapt more naturally and automatically to the mobile and always-on workforce.

2: Cloud Delivery

Modern businesses need to be incredibly efficient. Cloud delivery provides businesses with the opportunity to flexibly deploy services and software more consistently across converged premises, cloud, or hybrid infrastructures. An enterprise IT business plan should consider how and when to deploy certain services in the cloud, when to operate them on-premises, and when to purchase them as-a-service.

3: Collaborative Communities

Today’s growing workforce demands rich Internet-style applications that are easy to access from anywhere and work consistently from any device.  Organizations who have built collaborative communities by providing powerful tools that deliver consistent and intuitive user experiences, converged applications, and distributed architectures are able to adapt dynamically to change and empower employees to their fullest extent.

4: Assured Services

Securing business information—protecting your company’s intellectual properties and digital assets—falls squarely on the shoulders of IT.  Add security with the need to assure business continuity, and you get a business that must consider greater infrastructure planning, high availability at multiple layers, a consistent and aligned security credential methodology, and which must validate automated archival methods.

Steps to Modernization

Competing in today’s business environment is about meeting challenges, making decisions, and innovating rapidly—using the best and most current technologies, tools and information.

Cloud services, mobile integration, real-time collaboration, and high availability are becoming essential ingredients for the smart and secure enterprise. They are part of a rapidly evolving technology foundation by means of which the best solution providers enable new approaches to how your businesses IT services are delivered and managed, allowing you new opportunities for growth.

Want to know more about IT Modernization?

In an upcoming post we will discuss Enterprise IT Modernization Strategies and their benefits. And, if you’re going to Enterprise Connect this year, be sure to come see us.  Our solution experts will be happy to discuss how our IT solutions can help empower your smart enterprise. 

The productivity benefits of Unified Communications (UC) continue to be recognized as it moves into mainstream adoption. As organizations consider how best to deploy, there are a number of factors to consider.  This post focuses on the top reasons to consider Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS).  UCaaS capabilities, also known as hosted or cloud-based UC, include the features found in premises-based IP telephony, as well as presence, integrated audio and web conferencing, mobility, collaboration, video solutions, and business application integration features all delivered as a service.

The benefits of UCaaS go above and beyond simply shifting costs from a capital expense to a predictable operating expense.  Here are our top 7 reasons to consider hosted UC solutions:

 1.       Business Agility

Many IT organizations are stretched too thin and struggle to balance day-to-day operations with strategic projects.  One of the advantages of UCaaS is the speed of deployment.  Businesses have the flexibility to rollout UCaaS without the IT time and resource commitments associated with a legacy deployment model. Additionally, maintenance and support time is reduced as there is no longer the need to plan and implement system updates.  UCaaS offers quick updating through the cloud, so a business can choose to deploy new applications to all users or a single department as soon as they become available. This gives an IT department greater flexibility with their communications system, as upgrades can be rolled-out without any disruption to the system. 

2.       Increased Efficiencies

Hosted UC services provide business customers with the communications they need without the associated capital costs of traditional on-premises systems and the costs associated with management and support. This increases both budgetary and IT resource efficiencies. With a lower budget barrier to entry, businesses can avoid the upfront capital outlay with UCaaS. Additionally, the predictable monthly expense allows businesses to plan more efficiently. A hosted UC solution can also increase IT efficiencies as there is no need to support and maintain a physical systems on-premises.  Eliminating a number of time consuming tasks for IT folks allows the organization to focus resources on core competencies and provide strategic value to grow the business.  

Having your communications solution in the cloud helps avoid technology obsolescence and the time and resources associated with a large scale “technology refresh.” Why? Because cloud-based communications give you a system that scales quickly and is flexible enough to grow alongside your ever-changing business. 

3.       Increased Reliability

Hosted UC providers power their UCaaS offerings via the cloud. The best providers have secure and resilient data centers that are redundantly configured and geographically separated to ensure continued service in the event of catastrophic events and Service Level Agreements that provide uptime guarantees. Each organization’s data and user settings are backed up and mirrored in multiple locations, creating a disaster-proof backbone for your business communications.  Hosted UC providers also offer 24x7 monitoring, as well as the latest encryption and security protocols, so you can rest assured that your data is safe and secure.

 4.       Disaster Recovery

In the event of an emergency or disaster, a UCaaS service provider can easily adapt to your changed situation without additional expenses on your part.

Most companies have a Disaster Recovery Plan in place to ensure that data and records vital to the operation of the business are duplicated or protected in off-site storage repositories.  UCaaS now provides the ability to ensure that business communications are also protected in the event of an emergency and can be incorporated into the overall Disaster Recovery Plan.

 5.       Greater Mobility

UCaaS is a strong enabler for the mobile worker, the BYOD explosion, and remote/home office worker.  It allows users access to all business communications features from any registered user device, including a smart phone, laptop, desktop and, of course, desk phone.  Organizations can enable users’ smart phones to transparently bridge calls from the company’s Wi-Fi networks to cellular networks and back again, keeping  “on-the-go” and “location agnostic” users connected.  Desktop client software can turn any networked PC into a virtual desktop phone and unified messaging terminal.  Users can travel with their extensions, use video conferencing, and access advanced call forwarding and web-browser dialing. IT organizations often struggle with managing application across numerous devices. With UCaaS, users download the device application from the app store and IT can easily manage their access.  An additional user benefit is that the experience is the same across all devices.

 6.       Increased Collaboration

True collaboration means anywhere, anytime access on any device. UCaaS gives your users access to applications that will let them instantly chat, set up on-the-fly conferences/meetings (both video and voice), share and exchange documents, and engage customers in real-time dialog. This will not only improve your workforce’s ability to be nimble, but will also improve customer satisfaction.

 7.       Better Customization

UCaaS combines enterprise-grade voice features with sophisticated Unified Communications and Collaboration applications and hosts them in the cloud. UCaaS gives you the flexibility to choose the deployment model and applications to fit your specific requirements. It also offers the flexibility to expand or contract as your business requirements change.

 Additional Resources

To learn more about how Unified Communication as a Service can help you take advantage of the latest UC technology, easily connect mobile and remote users, and free up time for the other IT projects you need to get to, click below.

HITEC begins today, and our NEC hospitality team is looking forward to the trends that we will be seeing on the show floor. Here are some of our predictions:

Customer Compatibility
In my November blog post BYOD: Expanding to Hospitality, I referenced a Pew Research report that noted that more than half of all mobile phone users rely on their portable device to search for information on hotels. With mobility, you can get everything you want, where you want, plus gain positive benefits in revenue, guest experience and marketing. With the steadily increasing volume of mobile network users, what better time for a hospitality business to embrace the guest BYOD trend and get them more connected to your business than ever before.

Guest Experience
The bottom line of any investment decision is guest experience. Does it improve guest experience? Will this be guests’ expectations moving forward? Will this keep my guest satisfied? And will this help their decision to return? The right services, staff training and communications systems are essential in order to maximize guest satisfaction and return stays. When you see new and existing technologies on the show floor, think about what the trickle-down effect is. If, in the end, it does not improve the guest experience, you may want to reconsider your investments.

Unified Communications
Small to mid-sized properties make up the majority of all hotels in North America. NEC recognizes that hotel operators have increased pressure, in today's tough economic times, to maintain superior guest services while improving staff efficiency and lowering overall operating costs. At HITEC, NEC will be demonstrating UNIVERGE 3C for Hospitality – an innovative, affordable unified communications solution specifically tailored for the burgeoning mid-sized hotel market and built on the proven, award winning UNIVERGE 3C software platform - a flexible, scalable, reliable and cost effective IP PBX.

During HITEC 2013, NEC will also demonstrate how its solutions help organizations provide the best guest experience possible by being and staying connected. It will showcase its latest UNIVERGE® UC&C and Cloud technologies, which are designed to help organizations be more mobile, connected, collaborative and productive. Additionally, NEC will be introducing biometrics solutions to help hospitality organizations improve customer engagement.

Stop by booth #907 to experience all of these solutions. Not going to HITEC 2013? Follow us on the floor at @NEC and use the official hashtag #HITEC. Check out the video below to see how NEC has helped hotels around the world recover missed revenue opportunities, increase customer service, and enhance the overall guest experience.

The Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education (ACUTA)

NEC is in full force at the second full day of the 42^nd Annual ACUTA  conference and exhibition, which focuses on technology and communications in higher education. The show is taking place at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, CA, until Wednesday.  

We are here at Booth 513 showcasing our portfolio of integrated solutions for higher education, which includes mobility, unified communications and cloud-based communications. You can also get real-time updates and photos from the show on Twitter via @NEC_Channels.

After a successful first day at ACUTA 2013 yesterday, we learned a few tips and tricks on who’s who in the “Twitterverse.”

• First off, if you’re not following the official ACUTA 2013 hash tag, you need to check it out - #acutaconference13. You’ll find ample content from show participants and vendors, session takeways and key conversations just waiting for your input. If you were unable to attend ACUTA 2013, following the official hash tag will help keep you updated on all of the happenings at the show. 

• On the same note, the conference’s official Twitter page, @ACUTA, contains updated session and event information. 

• ACUTA’s president for 2014, and an NEC customer, Mark Reynolds, is tweeting his personal ACUTA 2013 observations at @msreynolds55 (pictured below).

• Check out John Gallant, chief content officer of IDG, on Twitter @JohnGallant1. He moderated the conference keynote, “Envisioning the New IT Organization Through the Eyes of an Extraordinary CIO,” yesterday (pictured below).  

• Another must-follow is Marty Parker and the great minds with @UCStrategies. There’s always something to learn from their unique insight on Unified Communications.

• This year, ACUTA introduced a new social medium called Rockzi. Just visit www.acuta.org/rockzi to keep tabs of the latest industry news from ACUTA participants and vendors.  

Are you following a participant or vendor at ACUTA 2013 that deserves a shoutout? Let us know by commenting below.  

NEC recently attended the 2013 National Automotive Dealers Association (NADA) Conference in Orlando, Florida. The NADA Convention is the automotive industry event of the year and the world's largest international gathering place for franchised new-vehicle dealers.

NEC participated with Phillip Sherman, CEO of Telecom Advisors Group, Inc. and one of the leading independent automotive industry technology consultants in the nation.

Like many companies today, auto dealerships are interested in the best ways to cut costs and increase the productivity of their sales team and services advisors. The NADA convention gave the perfect opportunity to show the ROI of Unified Communications (UC) technology and demonstrate how it helps the rapidly growing automotive industry reduce cost, improve productivity, and increase customer satisfaction. Customer Satisfaction is important in any industry, but particularly in the automotive industry, which relies heavily on its Customer Service Index (CSI) score. For example, JD Power and Associates reported that dealerships with high CSI scores during the first three years of ownership retained 79 percent of dollars spent on maintenance and repairs during the first five years of vehicle ownership.

The auto industry is heavily impacted by technology to help make improvements for both the dealer and the customer. NEC employees were also on hand demonstrating our communications solutions to more than 20,000 conference attendees. With the need for uninterrupted roaming and productivity from any location within a dealership, applications that allow cellular and Wi-Fi roaming were of key interest to attendees. For those automotive dealerships tired of losing revenue due to appointment no-shows, we demonstrated our Appointment Reminder to show them how to alleviate this frustration by simplifying the appointment reminder process and communicating with their customers more efficiently. In the auto sales environment, responding to and distributing call-in and internet leads is critically important. Leveraging contact center technology that queues, distributes and tracks customer opportunities provides dealers with a competitive advantage and the ability to respond as quickly as possible.

To learn how uMobility or Appointment Reminder can enhance your organization click below.