The U.S. Dealer meeting topics make a big shift to new age topics with collaboration, IT and Web oriented communications solutions, and even have to leverage social networking!
Category Archives: Sphericall
NEC Delivers All Cloud Experience Podcast
Nice Podcast from the EnterpriseConnect show floor.
Listen Here
Thank you Doug and our friends over at telecomreseller.com for posting this nice piece on their web site.
Notable Quotes & Keypoints – NEC UC&C
As I do several more follow up interviews with analysts this week about our announcements and demos at last weeks EC2011 it is interesting to take note of the overall impressions from the marketplace to date.
As a reference point, let’s remember back to the 2010 Gartner UC Magic Quadrant – where NEC first introduced our architectural approach and vision to the Gartner team. For the first time in many years it moved the dot for NEC north and east significantly towards the infamous “Leaders Quadrant”. A notable barometer reading for our strategy.
As many of us work very hard at NEC on execution of this product strategy it is also great to see many people make comments (either in blogs, tweets, or verbally at the EC2011 show) that suggest our execution is on track. Of course, we always want it faster – but what people saw at the show was very real and very live!
Here are some of my favorite and most notable quotes from our news:
“You guys have been busy.” – Zeus Kerravala, Yankee Group
“Wow, this is your Flare. I mean that in a good way” – Sheila McGee-Smith (independent analyst)
“NEC finally unleashes Sphericall – a very strategic UC solution for the company. watch it grow.” – tweeted by Dave Michels, Pin Drop Soup.
“The virtualization, device-neutral, and business-use centric nature of your approach was quite refreshing to me in light of some of the more conceptual and tech-centric announcements at Enterprise Connect. This software platform also shows great maturity in the face of the NEC Univerge hardware roots, so it’s always impressive to see such a shift.” – post-show email comment from Hyoun Park, Aberdeen Group
“NEC is brave,” Brent Kelly, Wainhouse Research, referring to our decision to run the NEC Booth from our Chicago data center (cloud).
“I thought it was TweetDeck,” Blair Pleasant, CommFusion / UC Strategies, upon seeing the RIA UC client for the first time.
Listed as most revolutionary and industry impacting news at EnterpriseConnect by Dave Michels in nojitter post (see chart attached).
“It’s a powerful migration story,” Marty Parker, UniComm Consulting / UC Strategies
“RIA Client has a pretty compelling visual user experience: quick and smooth access to rich UC capabilities,” tweeted Alaa Sayeed, Analyst at Frost & Sullivan
Current Analysis Intelligence Report Ratings:
Perspective = 4/5 stars – “Positive on NEC new product architecture…”
Vendor Importance = 5/5 stars – “Very high to NEC..”
Market Impact = 3/5 stars – “Moderate because timing is expected later in 2011” (we’ll be there in no time Brian!)
Thanks Dave Michels – of course we think you are right and we like being “in the green”! 
IBM Presents NEC Partner Solution for Lotus Foundations
10 Ways you can make Communications in your Small Business into Smart Business was the mantra for this story. While the focus on how easy it is to install and manage was the starting point, and great for dealers that want to focus on making money with their time not on configuring servers, the real question for the end customer is how does it change what I can do.
The slides says it all – if how easily and effectively your employees collaborate in your business has an effect on decision making, communicating with customers, staying on top of opportunities, and solving problems more effectively then you can choose the ingredients you need to make that happen. Pretty cool!!
Lotus Knows Remix
The IBM Lotus DJ guys pull together a nice little video remix from the 2010 Lotusphere event. They even used NEC’s very own Tajima-san!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uy7micFCcA
NEC WINS IBM Lotus CTO Award!!
Bringing together NEC technologies to create powerful solutions is what really strikes the hearts and minds of IBMers. In fact, it really strikes when you are utilizing IBM software technologies. At the Lotusphere show this week some of our NEC developers joined to showcase some leading technology concepts through actual prototypes.
Using and NEC device that can be easily worn on your belt it can connect audio and video and can provide data feeds from devices such as healthcare equipment (in the case of an @Home Patient Care scenario). Interesting, but only really valuable when you realize that this data can all be converged (or “Mashed up”) at a web portal (yes, IBM Websphere Portal) so that a Nurse or Doctor can assist this patient. Moreover, if the portal can also mashup services like Lotus Connections to establish an online knowledge base of experts/specialists and historical cases and it can mashup services like LotusLive to enable instant collaboration you
get an entirely new level of business value. Servicing customer situations with “a real expert” is expensive, and they’re usually in limited supply. Therefore if we can connect with remote people (patients, field support/service personnel, etc.) using multimedia technologies our efficiency and customer service quality can increase significantly. Naturally communications among humans invariably requires and audio connection and utilizing NEC’s Sphericall software services enables these applications to easily connect the different users as needed – not as phone calls dialed through a keypad, but through and automatic set of workflow instructions that just know people are trying to communicate.
In fact, the idea of the wearable device is so slick because there is not even a concept of dialing! You hit a button and the audio, video and data signals are set up to a dispatcher to help you, pretty important for elderly home health care.
NEC calls this approach the Visual Field Support (VFS) framework and the framewo
rk includes technologies from both NEC and IBM.
This week the IBM Lotus Chief Technology Office team reviewed demonstrations by numerous vendors and found the VFS framework to be one of the more compelling uses of combined vendors technologies
. As a result they awarded NEC with their annual CTO Award!!
Congratulations to the NEC Japan team!!
THE STREETS OF LOTUSPHERE
Entering the Dolphin hotel in Orlando for the annual IBM Lotusphere event you will observe the logo’s of IBM Lotus strategic partners, the first identity of NEC shows up here…
Officially, Lotusphere opened on Sunday with their annual Business Development Day. This is an opportunity for Lotus Partners to hold business discussions with IBMer’s and other Business Partners, discovering new opportunities, preparing the for the forthcoming week of events, and establishing new relationships. If anyone has this process of “relationships” = “business” figured out IBM does!
NEC Announces Sphericall for IBM Lotus Foundations
It was the culmination of lots of work at NEC, and at IBM, to get a simplified integration of NECs software collaboration technology onto the new IBM Lotus Foundations appliance. This morning at the opening of the annual Lotusphere show we started live demonstrations in the Lotusphere Product Showcase and in the Foundations Solutions Lab for IBM Strategic Partners. Below is the press info… Press Release Booth 207-209 NEC Announces Enterprise-class Unified Communications for SMBs, Fully Integrated with IBM’s Lotus Foundations Appliance NEC UNIVERGE Sphericall combined with Lotus Foundations creates complete communication solution for small and medium businesses LOTUSPHERE ORLANDO, FL, January 18, 2010 – Today at the annual IBM Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Florida, NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a leading provider and integrator of advanced communications, networking and IT solutions, announced UNIVERGE® Sphericall® for IBM Lotus Foundations, a unified communications solution that is fully integrated with IBM Lotus Foundations, an appliance that extends IBM Lotus Sametime unified communications and collaboration (UC²) tools with the ability to connect to telephony,. Sphericall for Foundations is designed as a pure software solution for small and medium businesses (SMBs) that combines all the basic communications needs with the power of new unified communications tools. The solution is tightly integrated with the Lotus Foundations appliance, making it one of the easiest and most complete business solutions available. Leveraging the autonomic technology in Lotus Foundations, a business can install and configure their entire UC environment in a single, easy to manage and cost-effective solution. “Now more than ever, SMBs want to take advantage of the benefits that unified communications can bring to their business, but they often do not have the resources and ability to customize and manage multiple applications,” said Jay Krauser, general manager, sales support and engineering, NEC Corporation of America. “The integration of Sphericall into Foundations with Sametime software opens up opportunities for businesses to give everyone in their organization access to enterprise-class communication features and functionality.” In addition to the networking and IT software services that the Lotus Foundations solution provides, the power of the NEC UNIVERGE Sphericall software enables many new options for businesses to enhance collaboration within their business, including: Connect Mobile and Remote Workforce back into Your Business:
- More - Save Travel Costs and enhance communications among your teams:
Easily utilize Existing Services or Equipment
Leverage the Benefits of New Services and Easy Administration
NEC’s UNIVERGE Sphericall for IBM Lotus Foundations and the IBM Lotus Foundations application solution will be made available from NEC Corporation of America as a complete offering, enabling a one-stop-shop for registered NEC dealers. Interested dealers and IBM Business Partners should contact NEC directly at the information below. Those attending the Lotusphere event this week can meet NEC partner representative at the Product Showcase or at NEC’s Bird of a Feather session. For more information on IBM’s Lotus Foundations please visit www.ibm.com/lotus/foundations. More information on NEC can be found here: Contact: About NEC Corporation of America Headquartered in Irving, Texas, NEC Corporation of America is a leading provider of innovative IT, network and communications products and solutions for service carriers, Fortune 1000 and SMB businesses across multiple vertical industries, including Healthcare, Government, Education and Hospitality. NEC Corporation of America delivers one of the industry’s broadest portfolios of technology solutions and professional services, including unified communications, wireless, voice and data, managed services, server and storage infrastructure, optical network systems, microwave radio communications and biometric security. NEC Corporation of America is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation, a global technology leader with operations in 30 countries and more than $42 billion in revenues. For more information, please visit www.necam.com (link resides outside of ibm.com).
“Small businesses want the benefits collaborative tools can provide, but these tools must be simple to buy, install, and maintain,” said Brent Kelly, Senior Analyst & Partner at Wainhouse Research. The ability for the Foundations Server to auto configure itself and a significant portion of the telephony system is a compelling capability that should make unified communications and collaboration much easier for channel partners to sell and for the SMB to adopt.”
www.necunified.com (link resides outside of ibm.com)
www.NECToday.com (link resides outside of ibm.com)
Twitter at www.twitter.com/NEC (link resides outside of ibm.com) and @NEC Facebook fan page: NEC Unified Solutions
Kris Kozamchak
Marketing Communications
NEC Corporation of America
469.426.7332 mobile
214.262.6528 office
Kristi.kozamchak@necam.com
Will CEBP create Chaos?
I read an interesting post to day that started out by suggesting that perhaps CEPB could potentially create network chaos, “If real-time, delay-sensitive voice traffic starts creeping into the business applications that don’t currently make this kind of demands on the network…” it said. I found it interesting to read this perception. Why? Well, first of all we’ve had the concept and the existence of users (as in people) utilizing tools at their PC desktops with real-time traffic coming to them for some time now. Today people watch High Definition television shows, join conference calls with video to their desktop, and utilize Internet-based soft phones everyday. Secondly, wouldn’t it actually be easier, perhaps less chaotic, if users can easily establish collaboration from any starting point? Guess what – all these users today are initiating this collaboration from various different starting points. So, if a business application happens to be one of those starting points does this create chaos? Is it really any different? One could argue that making communications an integral part of business applications will actually create less chaos than we already have! The other part that is missing in all this is the idea that there is a “machine-to-person” interaction that occurs as part of the business process design, where the machine is a software process executing on a set of business applications that at some point in time decides (in it’s workflow logic) that it needs to reach out and deliver (or gather) information from a human. In this case the real-time media is between the communications system and the user (perhaps on their cell phone, home phone, etc.), but the business process will have actually initiated the “call”. Now, imagine that an orders were processed faster and more accurately because CEBP enabled validation or order taking within waiting for a human to process that order — hmmm, that would be more efficient for the business and hopefully less chaotic too!
