Video and Telemedicine

For businesses, bringing people together face-to-face leads to advantages like improved communication, better, faster decision making and more effective team work.

In the case of telemedicine, high-quality video conferencing can save lives. Telemedicine can mean many different things, but often it involves connecting patients in small, remote clinics to specialists in large urban health care centers.

Telemedicine makes it possible for patients who need acute, chronic or emergency care to meet face-to-face with highly-trained specialists without the expense, inconvenience and delay associated with travel. Local providers perform assessments and provide care under the guidance of the specialists.

For patients, this means improved access to high-quality care. For local clinics, it means the ability to serve more patients locally and for specialists, it means being able to efficiently deliver more care to more patients from a single, centralized location.

When Renown Health (Northern Nevada’s largest integrated healthcare network) decided to implement a comprehensive telemedicine program to serve rural residents, they evaluated solutions from a number of video conferencing vendors including Cisco (Tandberg) and Polycom. In the end, Renown selected Scopia video solutions from Avaya. The result is the highly successful R-TeleMed program, currently covering 25 specialties with more on the way.

Scopia video solutions offer a number of advantages over competing solutions. Scopia video is the only option that provides HD-quality in both the data and the personal-interaction channel. For a specialist, the ability to view a diagnostic image, for example, in HD is critically important. Scopia solutions also offer important advantages in terms of security, ease-of-use and interoperability with existing systems.

You can learn more about Avaya and Renown Health’s R-TeleMed program here.

Are you an IITM? The VAR Guy told me that SMB’s Lose 24 Billion Dollars per Year In Productivity from Winging IT Management

This morning in our management meeting, we were discussing migrating some of our critical apps to the Cloud (onto a secure hosted platform). You would think that as a “Cloud evangelist”, I would make the decision immediately without thinking twice right? Wrong! As a responsible (read: due diligent, resource constricted, tight fisted) business owner, I feel that we need to review all of the options open to us. How much would it be if we kept the application and server in house (so I could reach out and touch it whenever I felt like modifying something or just gazing at it) versus how much would it cost to host it?  What other costs are there- beyond the apples to apples calculations of typical premise/cloud costs? It dawned on me that what is really happening is that instead of focusing on my core competency (helping my clients, sales, managing my staff, marketing – all of the things that a business owner does during the average day), I had become the defacto involuntary IT manager – or IITM. (You know I hate three and four letter acronyms- but, hey, I will use them to illustrate a point). Is there a cost for that?

I came across an article from one of my favorite columnists – The VAR Guy- and he introduced me to the IITM concept and its impact on my business. The full entry is available here: http://thevarguy.com/business-technology-solution-sales/smbs-lose-24-billion-productivity-annually-winging-it-management.

SMBs Lose $24 Billion in Productivity Annually From Winging IT Management

The VAR Guy

DH Kass

Tue, 2013-04-30 07:15

A new Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) backed research study discovered that SMBs worldwide fritter away some $24 billion in productivity annually by assigning non-technical personnel to manage their IT environments. Read between the lines, and the study makes the case for small businesses to more effectively leverage VARs and cloud computing.

The study, conducted by researcher AMI-Partners, examined the impact of so-called involuntary IT managers (IITMs) at SMBs in North America, Latin America and EMEA tasked with handling their companies’ IT solutions. In particular, the research focused on the impact on business productivity of IITMs in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Chile and India.

The $24 billion lost annually results directly from IITMs taking time away from primary business activities to perform IT management functions for which many are ill-prepared, according to the study’s findings. AMI surveyed 538 IITMs in small businesses with 100 employees or less and, from that data extrapolated that 3.8 million SMBs in the target countries manage IT internally with non-technical personnel.

While SMBs in the study invested $83 billion to equip their businesses with IT and communications equipment, they lost $24 billion in productivity trying to internally manage their IT environments. When asked about a solution to the problem, IITMs in the study believe that cloud-based solutions can ease some of the burden of managing IT.

“Many small businesses don’t have the budget for formal IT support, so they rely on the company’s most tech-savvy individual to manage their technology,” said Andy Bose, AMI Partners founder, chairman and chief executive. “As our research shows, relying on an Involuntary IT Manager can have an adverse impact on small businesses’ productivity, which can negatively affect revenue and translates into a very high opportunity cost.”

Other than pointing out how much productivity SMBs lose from fussing with managing IT operations on their own, the study’s findings indicated a movement to cloud services by SMBs. Indeed, some 33 percent of IITMs said they are likely to shift more IT spending toward hosted or cloud solutions while 36 percent are interested in a productivity and collaboration suite.

“The cloud when delivered right is a game-changer, providing small businesses with the IT solutions they need to solve their most challenging small-business technology concerns,” said Thomas Hansen, Microsoft SMB worldwide vice president.

Some highlights of the study’s findings:

• On average, IITMs lose about 300 hours per year of business productivity while managing IT
• 36 percent of IITMs feel that IT management is a nuisance
• 26 percent indicated they don’t feel qualified to manage IT
• 60 percent of IITMs want to simplify their company’s technology solutions to alleviate the difficulty of managing IT day-to-day

 

Using the Cloud and Managed Services to Make More with Less

The bigger a company is the bigger their IT staff – a truism. While the best companies learn to scale operations and solutions beyond a 1:1 ratio, staff growth inevitably follows corporate success and computing sophistication. However, the vast majority of companies are on the ‘understaffed’ side of this growth in a significant way frequently lacking dedicated IT staff completely. The majority of companies rely instead on local consulting companies, staff with rudimentary knowledge, or the teenage children of the owner (in all seriousness I’ve seen this too many times to count).

A large non-profit I spoke with not long ago has a staff of over 1,000 with geographically dispersed sites, but an IT staff of about 6. They certainly had little hope of getting everything done through no fault of their own with so few people to manage a dozen servers and over a dozen remote locations. This last case is extreme in its ratio, but the limited staff overwhelmed by the amount of work and its complexity is all too common. How would they have time, initiative, know-how to move to the cloud?

One of the keys is timing, not finding the time, selecting the window that helps avoid disrupting ongoing operations or slipping delivery dates. While some companies make an outright strategic commitment to the cloud diving in deep, the majority want to put their toe in the water to test it out. Adoption of cloud computing is being used far more than most people realize from payroll by ADP to CRM & SFA (salesforce.com, NetSuite, Intuit), and hosted VoiP/PBX systems. While cloud computing is the most important change in IT today, the majority of companies systems are still run in-house and moving anything to the cloud creates significant discomfort for many.

Testing the Waters

Here are some steps for deciding how to test these water vapors:

1. Select a provider; learn how things work; make a plan.
2. New initiatives make an excellent choice in generally avoiding CapEx, avoiding impact to current systems, and significant unknowns surrounding total computing requirements and change management.
3. Integrate initial efforts with already planned deployments.
4. Use existing maintenance windows for integration and testing.
5. Pick a system/solution that has low business impact risk – not payroll, CRM, SFA.
6. Duplicate your production system, or use a non-production environment (development, test, QA) though alternative environments are uncommon for smaller companies.
7. Avoid “leaps of faith”. They don’t really work for computing solutions… test, test, re-test.

 

Common Uses

• Secure file sharing with your extended team. From managing your own file system to using cloud SharePoint, there are many options available.
• Everybody has email, but many cloud solutions offer integrated calendars, folders, document management, and more making teams far more productive with all the email touch points.
• Expand web and application servers to reduce latency for remote workers, improve overall scalability, or free expensive hardware for more critical in-house computing.
• Establish a backup service – very easy with commonly available tools with direct file system integration as a drive letter (Windows) or volume (Unix).
• Duplicate databases for high-availability or business-continuity use cases – MySQL Cluster, Oracle streams, SQLServer replication, etc. from the current system to a cloud database instance. Implementing a redundant database would be the easier and safer use, but with the option to change to a high-availability solution at a future date.
• For some companies with more sophisticated data needs (and staff), data warehousing and lightweight BI of the reporting variety would be a good option. Performance is sometimes an issue for cloud databases. But for prototyping, developing and more, it could be a good starting point. Moving to dedicated, private cloud solutions, provide excellent capabilities for databases while supporting the dramatic benefits of the cloud simultaneously.

The Big 2012 Communications Predictions: How Are They Faring

As a global leader inbusiness communications systems, Avaya takes its position seriously. That’s why at the beginning of the year, it gets its best thinkers together to make predictions about communications technology trends, service innovations and broad market drivers.

Now that we’re into 2013, Avaya decided to take stock and see which predictions have been on target and which have missed the mark. You can see the full report at http://www.avaya.com/usa/resource/assets/whitepapers/12CommunicationTrendsfor2012Update.pdf

Here’s a synopsis:

#1: Mobility raises the expectation of availability. There is no question about the accuracy of this prediction—but it probably didn’t go far enough. Mobility is no longer just about availability. In its mid-year update, Avaya notes that employees now expect the same features and functionality in mobile devices as they have in their office.

#2: Contact centers test the value of voice. This is true, but it’s turning out to be a bit more complicated. In its update, Avaya points out that in today’s customer service world, it’s not about pitting one mode (voice, e-mail, text, etc.) against another, but “offering the right channel at the right time.” This requires proactively determining what kind of experience the user wants. “Once you identify the preferred channels, you can focus energy and resources on making them — and the customer experience — great.”

#3Contextual data spans the last mile of personal productivity.  Contextual data is information about the communications, not the communications itself.  Having contextual data easily accessible, for example, lets you retrieve a dial-in number and passcode after being dropped from a conference call. Or lets you instantly see a list of participants with information about how you’ve interacted with them and the documents and other resources relevant to the interaction. Getting contextual data is happening, but perhaps not as fast as expected. “At this point, contextual capabilities remain in their infancy,” Avaya notes, “with promising prototypes surfacing in the marketplace.”

#4: Businesses advance from social media to social business. Despite Facebook’s troubled stock market debut, social media is still hot. In the update, Avaya points out that companies increasingly use social media not only as a listening post but as a springboard to action. Establishing a command center for monitoring and responding to social media is becoming commonplace.

#5: Social media and customer care enter into an arranged marriage. Not only that, but the marriage seems happy all around. Avaya notes that as organizations get their arms around social media/customer care alignment, it helps them put real legs on their social media strategy.

#6: The SIP bar is raised again. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the foundation for streamlining enterprise networks and extending advanced communications to small and medium-size businesses. As more SIP-enabled applications become available, Avaya sees more organizations abandoning a cautious, stepwise approach to deploying SIP.

#7: Social interactions expose customer care’s flaws. There is no hiding in the world of social media.  Avaya notes that companies are getting used to its rough and tumble dynamics and responding by creating a culture of openness that encourages employees to engage.

#8: IT support staffs converge, part 2. This prediction will never be NOT true. But Avaya notes that while the movement to bring voice and data staffs together continues unabated, challenges keep arising (e.g., how to deploy unified communications.) Facing these challenges, IT continues to proceed cautiously “perhaps too much so in the eyes of some users,” notes Avaya.

#9: Continuous connectivity drives communications support services. Raw connectivity is critical to support services, allowing vendor support teams to “swarm” a customer problem using real-time by video and other tools.  In its mid-year update, Avaya notes that some companies are also migrating to other approaches, such as managed services, total outsourcing or software as a service (SaaS).

#10: Clients take control of managed services. IT departments are becoming more discriminating in the managed services they purchase and asking tougher questions, such as “Are our IT operating costs predictable? Do we have the IT staff we need? Do we have the budget to invest in the infrastructure to meet organization expectations?”  Answering “no” to any of these questions can make a company a prime candidate for managed services.

#11: UC managed services/outsourcing facilitates alignment between IT and business units.  Yes IT and business units keep cozying up. More and more, they are conducting unbiased analyses to determine whether creating a solution internally or turning to a service provider offers better value.

#12: “True” UC apps proliferate. Expectations for UC continue to grow, especially as BYOD enables true UC applications on smartphones, tablets and other devices. But barriers remain, as conflicting technologies and approaches limit usability and adoption. At midyear, Avaya is counseling companies to “discount the hype and do the homework.”

Strategic technology to deliver optimal customer service

Today’s customer requires instantaneous resolutions on the communications channel they prefer, but most businesses aren’t able to fully meet these demands.

Forrester examines the technology updates needed to empower agents and managers to deliver quality customer experiences, every time, regardless of the channel.

To learn the four key solutions that efficient and empowered agents need, download Forrester’s The Strategic Role of Customer Experience Technologies.

The Secret to Leveraging Mobile Devices at Work

Mobile devices like tablets, laptops and smartphones have transformed the way we communicate and share our lives, both professionally and personally.

How can you leverage this technology to your competitive advantage in today’s tough economy?

Watch the video MobileCollaboration Solutions from Avaya to learn about integrated, simple-to-deploy and easy-to-use tools to leverage mobile technology, regardless of your budget or bandwidth.

The benefits of mobile collaboration from Avaya include:

• Flexible, adaptable and scalable solutions that create efficiencies and put critical resources at your fingertips.
• Easy access and visibility into employee availability, keeping everyone updated.
• Secure and quick information sharing using user-friendly, drag-and-drop functionality.
• Predictable, solid return on investment.
• Ability to effectively reach new customers and communicate with current clients.
• Round-the-clock service and support so your IT team can focus on core business initiatives.

See how Avaya can find you a solution that works with your budget and helps you get ahead: http://bit.ly/101P4AL 

Video Success Improved by Careful Planning

Target Key Business Processes to Maximize the ROI of Your Video Initiatives.

Simple is a powerful concept, in the right hands. Think of a pencil. A simple pencil in the hands of an artist can create breathtaking images that touch and inspire viewers. However, that same pencil in other hands might be lucky craft a credible stick figure.
In other words, success is more than choosing a great tool.

Simplicity does matter, of course—particularly when it comes to rolling out a video collaboration solution to a workforce that is not accustomed to connecting and communicating by video.

However, the real key to reaping the benefits of video collaboration is identifying the business processes you want to improve and then targeting the video solution to address those needs.

Lawrence Byrd, Director of Collaboration Solutions at Avaya recently sat down with industry Analyst Gary Audin, of Dephi Inc to discuss the current state of video collaboration technology, including several exciting new developments that are both simplifying and accelerating the introduction of video collaboration into the enterprise.

You can listen to the podcast here.

They also discussed the importance of identifying and targeting key business processes for improvement when selecting and deploying a video collaboration solution.

Where are the business bottlenecks? Could product development be accelerated with better collaboration solutions, including video? What about customer service. What would it mean to a business if service representatives could invite customers into a video conference to help solve tough issues? How about sales? Would bringing solutions experts into more sales meetings via video allow a company to close more deals, faster?

When companies are able to target specific business processes for improvement through video collaboration, they are able to make smarter decisions about product, implementation, rollout and support—and more importantly, achieve a faster, measurable ROI.

Simplifying Video Collaboration for Everyone (Part 1)

Avaya made a number of important announcements at the Avaya Evolutions event in San Francisco about its Unified Communications and Collaboration portfolio. The press release is available here, but the purpose of this blog is it to offer some perspective on the announcements, particularly as they relate to the Scopia® video products.  

Avaya is driving toward enabling the mobile enterprise with easy-to-use, open collaboration solutions that work anywhere, anytime.

For the sake of clarity, it makes sense to break the announcements down into two categories: unified communications (UC) and video conferencing. Avaya provides the best of both worlds when it comes to UC and video. Some of the most exciting announcements have to do with the excellent progress Avaya towards the integration of these two worlds: For example, Scopia interoperability with Avaya Aura and integration with Avaya IP Office, the Scopia Gateway,and Avaya Client Applications (ACA) for Microsoft Lync.

The reality is that most businesses today have two separate networks—newer UC SIP-based technologies and separate H.323-based video networks. The good news is that Avaya offers investment protection regardless of which migration path a customer is pursuing—whether it’s moving from video to fully integrated UC or adding video to its existing UC solution. With this in mind, here’s a recap of the news for Unified Communications, we’ll tackle video conferencing separately (for pricing and availability, refer to the press release):

Unified Communications

• Avaya announced that Avaya Aura® Conferencing with Avaya Flare Experiencewill now incorporate video conferencing capabilities. Avaya already had video on the Avaya Desktop Video Device (ADVD), and is now expanding it to Apple iPad, Windows PCs, tablets, and smartphones. But wait… there’s more… the cost per user remains unchanged when you add video to your Avaya Aura session. We think that’s pretty cool. And because Aura is a distributed SVC-based switched architecture for very high scale video collaboration, it utilizes up to 25 percent less bandwidth than solutions from other vendors.   
• Avaya also announced the Avaya Client Applications (ACA)with Microsoft Lync, Outlook and Office integration.  ACA basically adds an overlay to Microsoft Lync and other systems, which enables customers to use their preferred user interface while connecting various platforms for point-to-point and multipoint video as well as other applications.

In summary, Avaya is enhancing its collaboration portfolio to simplify video conferencing, making it easy for people to collaborate by video virtually anywhere, anytime, using any device and over any platform.

How to sell your management on a new IP based phone system

An Internet Protocol (IP)-based phone system is much more than a few new phones plugged into your network.
It transforms your phone system into a next-generation communications hub, complete with cutting-edge
technologies that let your organization deliver better customer service while cutting costs. An IP-based phone
system piggybacks on your IP-network, connecting to the public-switched telephone network (PSTN) via your
Internet connection. Use this checklist to sell management on a new IP-based phone system:
1. Reduce the cost of phone charges.
IP telephony can significantly reduce the cost of your long-distance charges. It also reduces the
number of circuits to the PSTN you must pay for; for companies with several branch offices, this can
be a significant savings.
2. Reduce the cost of network management.
Moving to an IP-based phone system lets you consolidate your data and voice networks onto one
network, which translates to less money and time spent on network management.
3. Provide better customer service.
An IP-based phone system can be integrated with other business applications you use to provide
customer service, particularly a customer relationship management (CRM) program.
4. Simplify phone system management.
An IP private branch exchange (PBX) has an easy-to-use, Web-based interface that can be used to
make changes to any extension on the network. Your IT team can even move and add users remotely.
5. Gain enterprise-scale features.
IP-based phone systems include sophisticated features that are otherwise out of reach for all but the
largest companies. You can add an auto-attendant, integrated conferencing, and even a call center to
your phone system.
6. Leverage new technologies.
IP telephony enables more than VoIP (Voice over IP) phone calls. It also enables advanced communications applications like unified messaging, which integrates voicemail, e-mail, and texts, and Unified
Communications (UC), which integrates real-time and non-real communication media with collaboration tools.

Awareness- it’s not just for New Age Boomers anymore!

In the old, old days of business communications you would call someone on the phone and hope to reach them. Statistically, your chances of connecting to someone on the first try were quite low and you often ended up leaving a message with an assistant and waiting for a callback.

Then along came voicemail—now you could leave a message.  No assistant was needed, but your chances of reaching that person live probably worsened and you ended up playing “phone tag” and getting stuck in “voicemail jail.” The mobile phone helped, but also added a new problem: what number do you use to reach someone? When texting and Instant Messaging began to become popular, “presence” began to make an impact.  No one wanted to undergo the labor of typing out a message and hoping for the best. Instead, a little status indicator light next to a name or avatar indicates whether someone is available to receive your message. Now you can also get geo-presence—you can see exactly where a person is located.

According to Avaya, the next step beyond presence is “awareness.” A communications solution equipped with awareness will pay attention to not just where people are located and whether they are online, but also to their “real connection” to the matter at hand and what content needs to be shared.
Brett Shockley, Avaya’s senior VP and general manager for applications and emerging technologies, likens a communications-aware system to an executive assistant who parses and analyzes your email and other communications to arrange a meeting on your calendar, finds and delivers the documents you will need and then, when it’s time to connect, dials the number for you.

At a recent industry conference, Shockley showed a demonstration of awareness in action, using a smart filter in the Avaya Flare® Experience to set up a conference call. Starting with a display of his most recent and frequent contacts, he dragged and dropped contact cards for each potential participant.  As he made selections, the Avaya Flare software analyzed the connections between those people to identify the common project they were all working on and then pulled in documents related to that project.

Shockley said this kind of solution is designed to help “save the first 10 minutes out of every hour,” meaning the time you might waste pulling together the people and information required for the meeting to actually get started.