Archive for the ‘Podcasts’ Category

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.0KB)

Learn more about InformaCast^® CallAware™ by listening to this interview with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Development with Singlewire Software.

Transcript from Interview

We’re talking with Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management at Singlewire. Welcome Ken.

Thank you, Good to be here.

Hoping you can talk a little bit about CallAware a new — something that’s new to InformaCast. Do you want to just explain what that is.

Yeah we’ve had a lot of requests from customers in the past about having the ability to monitor some type of out bound call, most commonly it’s 911 but in other countries it might be a different dial-string and do something with it. Frequently people even don’t know that 911 is being dialed in their organization until maybe the next month when the police or fire gives them the list of erroneous 911 calls.

So what Call Alert does is it sits passively and watches the CallManager system to see 911 or whatever phone number you want to watch is dialed and when that happens it can send a message out to whatever group of devices that you want. Any device on the network that is a CISCO phone, IP speaker, desktop, analog paging system can receive this notification in text and audio just like you would any other InformaCast broadcast.

Can you put that to an example if your in a large building and lets say something happens on a floor and someone dials 911 what would what could be a typical scenario for that playing out then?

Actually a good example is we have a we are working with an organization in Europe that has eight thousand phones deployed on a very large campus, hundreds of buildings separate locations they have no idea if someone’s dialing an emergency number or not. With this is a very scalable product so they can have CallAware we can watch all eight thousand phones to see if 911 is dialed with minimal load to the voice system and when that happens the security office elsewhere on campus is notified this phone, this user at this phone dialed 911 at this time.

So much more efficient they don’t have to wait see what happened maybe they want to do something else as a result of that call and since InformaCast can trigger other systems it they now have the ability as does everybody now to trigger other systems and be notified when 911 is called.

So today someone would dial 911 and that’s going to the police or fire the dispatch is bringing trucks to the building and the security staff internally might not know that anythings going on at all.

Yeah I worked with another customer who said that the only way they know 911 is called is every month they get a report from the city saying here are the number erroneous 911 calls you’ve made here’s you fine so they had people accidentally dialing 911 police come help they never even know what happens because it’s a large organization spread across majority of the state. So they don’t even know that’s happening until they have to pay the fine. So they look at this as not only an improved communication but actually saves them money very directly.

Do you want to talk about the impact to the network and is this a solution that will scale across large organizations you mentioned this one organization is that typical?

Yes in fact we waited until there is a good method to build this so that we can scale to very large organizations. We do have customers that have tens and thousands of phones and we didn’t want to introduce something that could only be used on five hundred phones lets say. So it is very scalable we do it in such a way that we don’t have to actually watch each phone and that allows us to scale very very well.

I see do you want to talk a about when this will be available and how people can get this if they are interested or learn more?

It’s available in February 2010 and you can just contact your local sales rep if you’re interested in using this or you can always send an email to http://www.singlewire.com/talkwithus

OK easy enough.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:36 — 7.9MB)

What they are and what you need to know.

Are you a building administrator or public safety official looking for new ways of communicating within your organization? Are you looking for ways to improve communications utilizing the investment you’ve already made in your overhead paging system or IP network?

Singlewire InformaCast-compliant IP speakers provide a cost effective way for deploying an overhead paging/mass notification system within any organization.

In this podcast we talk with John Hood, a sound system designer and consultant with Singlewire Software. We learn more about what this technology is and how it is being used within organizations of all industries.

Transcript

INTERVIEWER: We are talking with John Hood. John can you describe what you do?

JOHN HOOD: We are primarily in Northern California in Nevada and on behalf of the Singlewire I help maintain the relationship between the Voice over IP phone world and the speaker world. So I act as a loudspeaker educator for like Cisco resellers or anybody that is a voice over Ip reseller.

INTERVIEWER: In that capacity you are involved with the know about installations for putting speakers into everything from a hospital to a school to

JOHN HOOD:  you name it to retail, warehouses you know any places where you use speakers we have installed IP speakers.

INTERVIEWER: So you know what is an IP speaker?

JOHN HOOD: An IP speaker is a speaker with an amplifier built in so it is self-powered. It gets its electricity from Power over Ethernet (PoE) or from the switch, so it’s got a network cable homerun to it, and then that’s it. That’s how you hook it up.

You take a network cable from the switch directly to it and then we have software that lives on the same network that gets the sound to the IP speaker via the computer network.

INTERVIEWER:  Are you limited by the number of speakers you can put on the network?

JOHN HOOD: No. Well as many places as you have to plug a speaker in you could plug a speaker into it. And as long as the network has power over Ethernet, where there are those occasions where a network does not have power over the Ethernet switches and at that point we can locally power the amplifier on the speaker with the AC adapter. But that is very rare. Most schools or most folks that are considering IP speakers have already considered IP telephones. So they have already built the network backbone to support those appliances and so the speakers plug-in just the same way like the voice over IP phone do. They just plug-in and way they go.

INTERVIEWER: Now this is a new thing, is there much of a difference in terms of the sound quality or the number of speakers that are needed in a room for a coverage?

JOHN HOOD: No it’s all about the same.

Since there is no head end equipment with a IP speaker system, there is no head end – the speaker is everything. There is some software. But the cost of that head end equipment is advertised out through the individual IP speakers. So as an individual unit they look expensive, but as a entire system since there is nothing else to buy and nothing else to install and nothing else to maintain but those IP speakers. They end up being a lot more reasonable. In short run, long run- in any way you look at them. But as an individual thing the price can be kind of shocking.

INTERVIEWER:  What are some of the other advantages that come along with a IP speaker versus a traditional system?

JOHN HOOD:  Well an IP speaker is inherently supervised. Meaning because it is a network piece of gear, the network always checking to see if it is there or not and if it has got issues. An analog speaker isn’t.

When an analog speaker isn’t working they only to know is to have an active page and go listen for the most part. Some analog sound systems have supervisory capabilities but for the most part they aren’t.

So people have and in lot of schools you will see that the speakers don’t work and nobody knows or nobody cares. They are just over it.
You know because of the wire, somebody truncates through the cable or something happens a long time ago and nobody goes back to fix it and they don’t realize it because a facility person doesn’t have to be standing near when it is not working, when active page is happening.

Because In their standard state there is no way to tell whether they are working or not unless somebody is making a page. So it is a complex thing to go and tone them out and make sure if there are working.
With a IP speaker they all work all day long. And here I am. I am here.

INTERVIEWER:  Now does it look from a network perspective..does it look similar to a computer on the network?

JOHN HOOD:  Not being a big network guy, I am a sound guy. It looks like a pretty darn simple thing.

I look at a webpage and all my speakers are on it and they are either happy and everything is fine or they are red and it is bad. And if it is red and it is bad then I go to the speaker and see if it is plugged in or not and that’s usually thus far.. that’s been the only failure you could find speaker unplugged or speaker broke.

Now we have had some failures you know they all have been out of box initial failures like I have had, I don’t even know, maybe a couple where a speaker quote unquote stopped working and I am not positive if they actually did stop working or somebody unplugged them.

INTERVIEWER:  What is the way to get audio to the speaker? People are probably use to seeing a microphone on a desk, we pick it up…

JOHN HOOD:  We connect it to the phone system and so somebody is going to  pick up the phone dial up our extension, which we are software but you can connect to us in a bunch of different ways.

A Cisco call manager talks right through to us, most voice over IP phones systems can talk right to us through the network or if it’s older stuff, we are equipped with anybody’s analog telephone adapter to be able to talk to our software.. and it can just live on any machine.

INTERVIEWER: You wanna talk about how does an IP paging speaker work in connection with an analog system that may already be in place..for an upgrade or there is a new wing going up in a facility.
How does that work?

JOHN HOOD:   Well there is a bunch of different ways. So for somebody that is not involved with IP telephony or isn’t interested in voice over IP phone.

They way we work is that you take sound, just two little box and that changes it.. little boxes that are about 50 bucks, 60 bucks or whatever that will interface easily with any computer system. So it is not, so all you have to know from a facility standpoint is that I got a hand audio to this little box and a pair of a phone wires and if you can’t do that we have some converters, there are all kind of commercial pieces of equipment to get it into our box.

So you hand me a RJ 11, a phone wire plug it in  our box and the way we go, you don’t have to know all that much and as far as programming and operating it, I have scheduled training as the IP speaker guide.
Scheduled training with dozens of schools.. only may be a couple of times, did the customer not already know how to operate it by the time I got there.. cause our web interface is very very easy. It’s as easy as shopping on line.

You know I just basically create a zone drag my speakers into my zone to create a paging zone and that’s how it works and then I kind of assign that paging zone a number and then with my telephone I dial the number and boom sound comes out.

INTERVIEWER: Integration between analog system is something that happens every day?

JOHN HOOD:   Sure, it happens every day now. Before there was but still happens. But the digital telephone.. I mean this has been going on for quite a while. You know phones were just purely analog devices and then they became more and more digital and now there are you know internet devices or network devices.. so this is not like some brand new magical  technology that came.. this isn’t some scary wiz bang way we are doing thing, this is stuff that has been going on for a very long time, we are just packaging it now into a speaker.

So we have been hooking up analog phones into IP phones. I mean you have no idea whether the customer or the person you are talking to you on the other end is talking over a voiceover I phone or Vonage or whatever and it is going to be a same thing with the speakers. There is ultimately going to be totally seamless.

Right now there are plenty of commercially available boxes to make that transition for us.

INTERVIEWER:   Finally real quick is this an internal only speaker solution for inside buildings or there are options for going outside too?

JOHN HOOD: AtlasSound has been making outdoor speakers forever but there are all kinds of electronic equipment that lives outdoors. There is tons of stuff so. We have a circuitboard manufacturer for us that will survive in whatever elements there are. We put it in a weatherized enclosure and you know away we go.

We have IP end points for outdoor usage that are meant to be out there and stainless steel enclosures that will last for zillion years.  I don’t know if zillions maybe slightly less, maybe mazillions.

The Solutions for Classrooms podcast features Ken Bywaters, ExecutiveVP of Product Management. 

Link to Podcast

Chris Barwick, Cisco Public Sector Regional Manager and Ken Bywaters discuss utilizing Berbee Informacast and Atlas IP speakers in the classroom.