COVER FEATURE
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The Smart Digital Workplace maintains ongoing, dynamic engagements with its occupants and stakeholders. The goal of the Smart Digital Workplace is to improve the usefulness and efficiency of a business facility to each of its stakeholders. Improvement may be measured in productivity, wellness, cost of operations, security and safety . Hemayun says, “The advantages of the Smart Digital Workplace are captured in interactions we call experiences. Experiences involve the dynamic relationship between assets – people, things, or both – and the workplace environment.” In the case of Linksys, the company’s Cloud manager offers a dashboard, which can help manage multiple access points on the same network; manage multiple access point in multiple networks of the same customers plus manage multiple access points of multiple networks for multiple customers. Amanulla adds, “Managing for multiple customers is an important feature for ISPs and MSPs. There is also no recurring subscription fee for the first five years. There will be lot of firmware and feature upgrades, which will be free for the first five years.” He opines that as SMB customers would have limited finances, they would rather want to invest in developing the Business and not on IT infrastructure. Similarly, they would prefer to invest OPEX in business development, not on having IT resources. “They should not be using limited Finance in CAPEX investments; we should be enabling solutions that they can buy on subscription basis as an operation cost from service providers of MSPs. They want cost effective solutions, not bells and whistles. They want value for money solutions and in the subscription based OPEX model, the total cost of ownerships for the next five years as with our new solutions goes down by about 40-60%.” Further, Linksys has enabled an easy user interface to manage all access point with all information on a dashboard at the click of a button which is robust and secured. “We are investing in the highest security level and getting third party security audits to see if there are any issues and fix them if any. We promise 99.99% uptime. Our cloud solutions are hosted on Amazon and Azure. And we are also investing in micro servers to host these solutions because that reduces risk if something goes wrong at all as a smaller server would be easier to replicate.” Avaya envisages two scenarios for how customer and bot interactions will be handled in real time—either the original bot contacts a friended bot on the customer’s behalf and delivers the received answer, or the original bot connects the customer to a friended bot in the style of a conference call.
AMANULLA KHAN Managing Director, Linksys META
“This is a huge step forward in addressing the information and service bottlenecks of chatbot systems,” said Helmy. “The social platform model also means that Avaya’s customers can increase the value of their chatbot solutions without having to engage in lengthy and costly data curation or warehousing projects.” As the above sampling of the various new technologies from select vendors reveals, these newer technologies will likely drive a significant change in the way Businesses enable their Business. It drives home the point that Businesses have no choice but to adopt newer technologies to stay competitive and to ensure they give customers a truly enriching experience across all touch points and ensuring cost efficiencies, better productivity and more. SMART SMB | OCTOBER 2018