Posts Tagged ‘Heathrow Airport’

BAA, the world’s leading airport authority, implements InformaCast at London Heathrow Airport.

Transcript of Video

TYVIAN TEMPLE: Within the BAA organization, we have about 900 sort of affiliates that work, that work within this area. That

ranges from you know, small retail outlets through to obviously, the major airlines themselves, BA, BMI, all the normal sort

of faces that you’d expect to see in an airport campus.

NIGEL WARBURTON: BAA have been in the process of replacing their IP network throughout the airport to a new standard that fits

best practice within the whole  marketplace. Full three layer model, lots of security.

EMMA CORNISH: If for instance the package belt goes down or there’s an urgent message that we need to pass across to all

staff, something to do with a particular flight or an issue that has arisen due to weather problems here at London Heathrow or

around the network. We also use it as a communications device to different departments and different staff members around the

terminal itself.

TYVIAN TEMPLE: From a voice systems point of view specifically, obviously the return on investment has already been apparent

with the Cisco IPT backbone. What it has enabled us to do is create one support model. In the past, the Legacy systems, we had

a dedicated PBX that provided paging and broadcast alongside the main house switch. In the new, and that was two help desks,

two support groups, and two different types of engineers that would come and support it. What we have now is obviously the

converged network, data and voice; we have our Cisco platform, and we have the InformaCast product nestled in that support

model. So we have one help desk, one number, and one set of engineers all trained for each one of those products. Makes it

much easier for the user community and obviously, it saves costs long run for BAA.

NIGEL WARBURTON: Naturally, you know security is a big concern. Having looked through the architecture, you know, separately,

with the InformaCast solution it does provide real security the way it can hop between ports, whether it can hop between

addresses, really does fit quite in my technical space.

TYVIAN TEMPLE: From a handover point of view, all the areas that we’ve now rolled out InformaCast to who’ve been accepted the

following day with absolutely zero snags to date that relate to the InformaCast product.

EMMA CORNISH: The staff have actually really enjoyed the new product. They enjoyed learning how to use it and also the fact

that it’s a lot better than the old [upstall] that they used to use. So it has been received really well. We didn’t have any

official training on it, but we found that the leaflets on the side of the phone have actually helped the staff with

everything they need to know in order to make or receive any communication calls, and it’s been fantastic.

TYVIAN TEMPLE: A nice product to work is one that goes through the design phase nice and simply. It’s capable of adapting to

some change in user requirements because user requirements at the start of a project and are never the same as they are at the

end; and you need the ability to change things or tweak things. We can provide multiple different types of presentation and

how people use their groups. So, we have one airline that has their groups very much displayed differently because that’s how

they’re used to using that product; where we can standardize all the others. So, it gives us a lot of flexibility. So from my

point of view, a product that can go through design without snags, come out design and go into implementation and be flexible;

and it delivers what it says on the tin, I think the InformaCast product has done that for me, which is really a nice app to

work with.