Speaker – Joe Burton, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Unified Communications, Cisco Joe delivered a session which flowed as follows:
- Focus on the world is flat, but now crowded, and increasingly the spotlight is on IT to deliver even if it is a non-standard application.
- 17% of CISCO workforce use Macs, CISCO IT doesn’t support or pay for Macs, consumerisation message.
- End points for unified communications are increasing. End points may be anywhere. 2 key drivers are cheap multimedia chipsets with UC capability and virtualisation.
- CISCO spend 25% of their development budgets on interoperability.
- Discussed CISCO thinking on tiered solution UC >> Video >> web 2.0 building together to a collaborative platform.
Example 1 : UC improves process for service / repair industry:
- Customer calls
- Telephony system integrated with salesforce.com to bring up customer details
- Call handler takes customers fault information
- To increase screen estate the cisco phone shows the map with the nearest available engineer
Example 2 : Coca Cola improve warehouse operations:
Old system:
- Order slips on paper
- Pickers (fork lift drivers) take paper and collect order
- Take order to checkers who validate
- Loaded to lorry
- Go
- 78% accurate
UC way:
- No paper
- No checkers
- Fork lift drivers get audio instructions over headset to go to particular place in warehouse
- Validation codes via audio to confirm correct location
- Then instructions on what to collect
- Then load on lorry
- 99.8% accurate
- Reduced traffic movements and accidents in warehouse
- Ability to move fork lift operators who are loading lorries for outward delivery to one area of the warehouse allowing the operators who stock the warehouse to efficiently re-stock
