TECHNOLOGY

How Virtual Reality Can Enhance Customer Experience Centers in a Post-COVID World

Published

2 years ago

January 12, 2022

How Virtual Reality Can Enhance Customer Experience Centers in a Post-COVID World

Due to the challenging times the world is facing right now, we are seeing more and more companies look to alternative means to showcase and demonstrate products.

One of the things that have been on the rise of late has been the Customer Experience Center or CEC for short. Brands are looking for creative ways to connect with their customers, and utilizing modern technology to showcase a company’s vision has tremendous benefits.

CEC’s have proven in recent years to be one of the most effective ways for brands to showcase their latest products and identify with customers in unique ways like never before.

Benefits of the CEC

One of the more effective ways of showcasing complex enterprise offerings or products is through a live and interactive demonstration. This is the core value of the CEC; being able to provide prospective customers with the “try it before you buy it” approach. This is especially true for cutting edge technology, many times in which executives and enterprise decision-makers haven’t even tried as of yet.

With virtual reality specifically, a vast majority of C-level executives haven’t used the medium in an enterprise training setting. A small sampling has tried it for gaming but just haven’t had the opportunity to gauge the effectiveness of VR for improved learning efficacy.

Enter the CEC VR demo, a chance to see first hand the power of using VR as a medium for knowledge enhancement. It is one thing to have an online demo or case study, but it an entirely different ball of wax to put on a VR headset and try a simulation first hand.

Not only does the CEC provide a chance for brands to show off their latest technology, but they also showcase the brand’s leadership towards innovation and product excellence. This also gives a chance for brands to consolidate sales offerings in one convenient location without having multiple channels for difficult to showcase products. Many times due to cost it just isn’t feasible and this leads to longer sales cycles which slow profits — being able to consolidate is a huge win and should bolster overall win ratios.

Drawbacks of the CEC

While the CEC can be a unique way to showcase and demonstrate product offerings, it does not come without some disadvantages. Specifically, during the current global pandemic, there may be issues having groups of people close together for product demos. Due to COVID-19, there is a lot more pressure on companies to reduce social interactions, and this may directly relate to the CEC mantra. In fact, due to the Coronavirus pandemic, a lot of CEC’s were forced to shut down as they typically had large groups visit them at a time.

Another thing to be aware of is the initial cost to put a CEC together. They take up considerable real estate, and the cost is generally high as many times they feature cutting edge technology and require specific hardware and support staff to maintain and utilize effectively.

How Current Drawbacks Are Being Addressed

In order to optimize the effectiveness of CEC’s many groups are starting to include them in their HQ’s where dedicated employee resources can be tasked without the need for extended travel costs and upskilling. This way the center is managed effectively and workers have the flexibility and freedom to continue their day to day activities outside of the CEC.

In the wake of COVID-19, many centers have had to reduce the number of people they can allow inside at one time. Space has been created between showcases and demonstrations and careful considerations are being taken to sanitize high traffic areas. By doing this and following social distancing protocols CEC’s can still function in a safe and effective way.

Immersive Technology & Hands-On Demos

With the advent of immersive technology, we have seen a number of CEC’s start to adopt using both VR and AR use cases inside their centers in order to have interactive demos of product offerings in order to bolster sales. Many times products can be complex and having a first-person demo of the product or simulation where the user can “try” the product even in a virtual environment can be extremely helpful for a buyer.

Virtual Reality specifically can place the user in an exact replica environment and allow the customer or prospective buyer to simulate the function of any product or even service. Augmented Reality, on the other hand, can be used with real-world props to highlight features and showcase overlays to enhance product knowledge to provide a more informed consumer which leads to bolstered sales. In the example above a box of Samsung headphones can be scanned with a smartphone to produce an augmented view on a mobile device and allow the user to see product reviews, technical specifications, and sharing options for getting a 3rd party opinion if needed.

All of these are tools that will enhance enterprise sales of which is the main role of the CEC anyway. With CEC’s using modern technology businesses that are adopting will see an uptick in sales as a more informed consumer is one that buys more. Overall the CEC revolution will continue to grow and we will see more and more brands look to enhance their sales and product offerings using immersive technology.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud