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Livescan That’s Truly More Efficient, Hygienic, and Affordable

Posted by John Dowden on Posted in Biometrics, Law Enforcement Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a higher priority has been placed on creating more hygienic workplaces and public spaces to prevent the spread of the disease. Corrections and law enforcement officers, public safety workers, courtroom professionals, and all employees supporting law enforcement and legal systems must take greater measures to protect themselves and the public.

For instance, potential COVID-19 outbreaks in our nation’s jails and prisons can put incarcerated individuals, the correctional workforce and surrounding communities at risk. In response to this danger, leaders and employees of correctional facilities have been tasked to combat the crisis in a way that protects the health, safety, and well-being of all individuals.

SmartScan®, NEC’s livescan solution, helps improve and verify the quality of biometric images, including fingerprints, palmprints, faces, irises, and even scars, marks, and tattoos (SMT). In addition to providing law enforcement with the most accurate and easy-to-operate solution in the industry, SmartScan also offers a hygienic user experience through our optional NEC NeoFace® face recognition technology for biometric logon and identity verification. With multiple configuration options to meet various budgetary requirements, NEC’s SmartScan truly is the most affordable, hygienic, and intuitive solution on the market today.

DID YOU KNOW… NEC’s SmartScan has a proven track record in numerous livescan deliveries, including Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Texas Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, Alabama Huntsville Police Department, Alabama Atmore Police Department, and Alabama Mobile County Sheriff’s Office!

Automated, Accurate, and Efficient

The problem with livescan systems today is that they haven’t changed much in 20 years. They suffer from an obsolete design, outdated user interface, lack of security features, and poor maintainability.

NEC’s SmartScan is different. It has an intuitive user interface leveraging the built-in capabilities of Microsoft® Windows® 10, such as modern pinch-and-zoom and swipe features that effortlessly guide livescan operators through the image capture process. Other benefits include:

  • Auto-capture function – Dramatically speeds up the image capture process.
  • Superior image quality – Captures high quality images for accurate search.
  • Rapid processing – NEC’s biometric image processing tool provides immediate feedback, making it easy and fast for operators to review and ensure the quality of captured images.
  • Intuitive user interface – Visually guides operators through the capture process, making it easier, faster, and more automated.
  • Easy integration – Can be integrated into existing criminal history, records management, and jail management systems.
  • Convenient and flexible web client – Facilitates system administration and configuration management.

A closer look at NEC’s SmartScan

DID YOU KNOW… NEC’s SmartScan offers face recognition as an option to create a touchless, more hygienic experience, even with face masks on!

Hygienic and Safe

With the awareness brought about by COVID-19, public safety workers are seeking potential ways to reduce the spread of coronaviruses and other pathogens that may surface in the future. NEC’s SmartScan supports this goal by offering a more hygienic approach, including:

  • Flat (4-4-2) fingerprints instead of rolled fingerprints – Speeds the process and reduces contact time for livescan operators and the individuals being processed.
  • Responsive touchscreen – even while wearing gloves.
  • Optional use of face recognition to avoid contact –
    • Operator biometric logon
    • Subject verification
  • Built-in foot pedals – Provides another option in the capture of fingerprints, palmprints, and other biometric images instead of touching screen, making it more sanitary for operators.

Affordable and Solid Return on Investment

Most agencies are facing budget constraints during the COVID-19 pandemic. NEC is proud of the affordability of our SmartScan solution, offering flexible options to meet budgetary and operational demands. For example, SmartScan is available in multiple configurations, including a ruggedized cabinet with a large display. Desktop and portable options are also available to meet all funding requirements.

Taking it one step further, through our flexible leasing programs, NEC can not only help eliminate the need for a large upfront payment, we can also help deliver the solution with affordable monthly payments. Furthermore, NEC offers GSA pricing and other intermediary pricing schedules to avoid the cumbersome procurement process, making it easy to own a SmartScan.

Working within your funding constraints, NEC offers flexible customer support and service options, including onsite, remote, or assist-as-needed, to better meet your operational and budget needs.

Why NEC’s SmartScan

NEC’s award-winning solutions are backed by rigorous research and development (R&D), including more than $1.2 billion invested in R&D annually. Our biometric algorithms have been validated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in comprehensive evaluations, including:

  • Eight consecutive wins in NIST evaluations for fingerprint matching
  • Five consecutive wins in NIST evaluation for face recognition
  • Ranked number 1 in NIST evaluation for iris recognition

As a Fortune Global 500 company with 120 years of experience and technology expertise, NEC offers the fastest and most accurate face recognition and fingerprint matching algorithms. In addition, our face recognition technology is the most resilient for low resolution and poor-quality images. We currently have over 64,000 patents and over 700 large-scale biometric solutions installed in more than 70 countries. We are here today and tomorrow to support your mission-critical operations!

NEC’s SmartScan solution streamlines processing and captures superior quality digital biometric images in far less time and with fewer rejected scans. To learn more about SmartScan, you can explore here.

A New Vision for NEC’s Smart Enterprise

Posted by Larry Levenberg on Posted in Analytics, Contact Center, Education, Finance, Healthcare, Hospitality, Retail, Servers and Storage, Software-Defined Networking, Unified Communications Tagged , , , , , , ,

As the enterprise environment changes, it’s up to technology partners to provide tools and stay adaptable to help support those businesses. NEC has a wide breadth of core UC and IT products and each stands on its own to help solve common technology dilemmas. Our NEC Smart Enterprise encapsulates those multiple solutions into one powerful enterprise approach to meet the demands and complex needs of today’s end users and IT executives.

With Paul Kievit expanding his role to SVP of Enterprise and a new Frost & Sullivan report, we’re building out a new vision for NEC’s Smart Enterprise.
Paul Kievit’s New Vision for the Smart Enterprise

In an effort to respond to market forces and transform Enterprise operations across both the Americas and EMEA, I am pleased to announce that Mr. Paul Kievit, Head of EMEA Enterprise Solutions, will assume the additional role of Senior Vice President of Enterprise for NEC Corporation of America.

Under Paul’s leadership and passion, his team helped develop the NEC Smart Enterprise go-to-market message and approach, which has been adopted by NEC businesses globally. Paul’s vision for NEC Smart Enterprise is to continue to develop and sell solutions around the customer experience:

• Addressing unmet customer needs
• Implementing best practices
• Creating excellence in the customer purchase experience
• Building brand equity and adopting NEC solutions to customer demands

NEC Smart Enterprise Explained

Built on four key objectives, NEC Smart Enterprise helps executives face the complex needs of enterprise users head on:
• Architecture flexibility
• Software-defined anything
• Business continuity
• Internet of things

These elements allow businesses to improve how their employees communicate and collaborate, as well as improve the security of the information that is shared throughout the organization.

Moving to the Cloud
As IT executives adopt cloud-based IT and communications services, they hope to solve the challenges of data storage and scalability, maintenance requirements and multi-vendor platform integration. Decision makers, concerned with quality control, security risks, reliability and installation challenges, need to work with a provider and cloud model that addresses their unique needs. A hybrid cloud architecture can combine the best of a public and private cloud, allowing the organization control where they need it and outsourcing other components. Customizing the cloud environment strategically adds architecture flexibility and prepares for future business needs while improving business continuity and compliance.

Meeting the Workforce Where They Are
Business agility helps a mobile workforce respond to customer and business challenges on the go. The legacy focus on hardware has given way to a more flexible architecture of software services. Users and applications expect to work together in an ecosystem that should be available everywhere at any time. Virtualizing networks, through software-defined-anything, relieves the burden of time, real estate, and manned resources and therefore decreases the cost to the enterprise. The benefits of software-defined environments are simplified management, security, ability to scale, and less staff requirements with business continuity built-in.

Preparing for the Worst
While IT departments can “pray for the best” during their primary activities of rolling out new technology or resolving end-user quandaries, business continuity is not just an option anymore. Traditional business continuity solutions involved red tape and budgetary challenges to pay for the expensive hardware requirements. We have finally reached an era of business continuity/ high availability (BCHA) affordability through nearly always-up service level agreements, and users are demanding nothing less. Today’s enterprise technology partners must provide reliable data access through a variety of elements such as virtualization, load-balancing server software, fault-tolerant servers, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), scalability, security and threat management.

Improving Security
The internet of things (IoT), while adding a layer of security through connected devices and biometrics, can also build business value through analysis of the captured data. Law enforcement, higher education, and enterprise organizations leverage video monitoring and multi-factor authentication to prevent theft, monitor crowds, and create more secure areas and access control. Retail, hospitality, and healthcare also rely on video and biometric recognition to increase customer loyalty, improve record accuracy and reduce operational costs. Executives want to invest in IoT technology and need a partner who can maximize the benefits while easily accessing the data through reliable servers with nearly unlimited storage capacity.

The NEC Approach
The Frost & Sullivan vision of a technology partnership that solves enterprise challenges is reflected in NEC’s capabilities and product solutions. Our fault-tolerant servers, the full line of general purpose storage products–including our high-end HYDRAStor product which scales to almost unlimited data, work together with NEC’s SDN and UC solutions to build a quality Smart Enterprise solution for the enterprise marketplace. By condensing the amount of data center space required to run critical applications, and including biometrics into the mix, the new vision for NEC Smart Enterprise reduces costs for organizations and continues to add value, even to existing infrastructure.

• NEC offers hybrid cloud solutions customized to best fit the need of the enterprise, even those with regulatory and compliance challenges.
• An industry leader in the SDN space, NEC’s open architecture enables a flexible and simpler approach to the network design and provides business agility to the workforce.
• Disruptions to business, planned or unplanned, can be damaging to any size business in today’s climate. NEC’s secure fault-tolerant servers–as well as Active-Active communications with multiple software instances balancing the load in real time for high availability, provide true business continuity, even in hybrid environments.
• NEC’s facial recognition, biometrics and behavioral analytics solutions create the ability to gain business intelligence and maximize IoT solutions, creating a forward-thinking smart enterprise.

With new focused guidance and leadership, our NEC solutions for Smart Enterprise and passion for improving the customer experience helps to meet and exceed the needs of technology leaders, preparing them for the future.

To learn more about NEC’s Smart Enterprise, download the Frost & Sullivan Report. (Companion Piece) or the full report here.

Smart Enterprise

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Calling All SpiceHeads!

Posted by Bryan Williams on Posted in Analytics, Education, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, Retail, Servers and Storage, Software-Defined Networking, Unified Communications Tagged , , , , , , ,

NEC Engages the SpiceWorks Community in 2016

With social media now a major part of our everyday lives, it is no surprise that groups with similar interests and experiences form almost instantaneously across the internet. Everyone knows the most popular social media applications like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter as well as a number of other applications and sites that cater to specific audiences.

For IT professionals, one of the major social media networking sites of choice is Spiceworks. The site connects IT pros with an online community of their peers from around the world. It also provides them with useful tools, for free, to help them do their jobs. Applications such as network inventory, network monitor, and help desk as well as rich APIs that developers and the world’s largest tech brands use to build applications and help IT pros solve their unique challenges.

It also provides a forum for IT pros to share experiences and expertise with millions of their peers, and they can reach thousands of vendors to troubleshoot, get product advice, keep up with tech trends, and even advance their careers. And most uniquely, it is a place where they can connect 1:1 and build real relationships with tech marketers.

NEC Corporation of America has its own Spiceworks vendor page with over 2,000 followers and regularly participates in the annual SpiceWorld IT Conference, with this year’s North American Conference held November 1-3 in Austin, Texas. There is also a European conference scheduled for May of next year to be held in the United Kingdom.

NEC sponsored a booth at the North American conference, where “SpiceHeads,” as they call themselves, from around the region were in attendance, many of whom learned that NEC is more than just projectors and LCDs. The interactive booth exposed them to the wide range of IT products and services XS that NEC has to offer. Subject matter experts (SMEs) were on hand to provide more in depth information about the solutions on display.

SpiceHeads have established SpiceCorps groups throughout the country that hold monthly meetings, often held at vendor locations. NEC sponsored a meeting of the Dallas/Ft. Worth SpiceCorps Group, with 24 members in attendance. The event provided an opportunity for the DFW SpiceCorps group to tour our Executive Briefing Center, where they learned that NEC is much more than display screens, we provide products and services that empower the Smart Enterprise.

Prior to the meeting, NEC sent out a survey to the members and asked them what topics they would like covered. This was an effective way of ensuring that the presentations focused on the topics they wanted to hear about, as well as provide an opportunity to discuss how NEC solutions can help tackle their most challenging IT issues. Members noted that NEC was the first vendor to use this approach and they were appreciative and impressed.

NEC executives Larry Levenberg, Vice President – Sales & Channel Marketing, and Ram Menghani, Vice President – UC Products & Support, were on hand as well as SMEs from every NEC business unit. Topics during the highly interactive and informative presentations during the meeting ranged from Software Defined Networking (SDN), business continuity, data storage solutions, and a preview of NEC’s cloud-based solutions. NEC’s Sam Safa presented Simplifying the Network with Software Defined Networking, which was especially popular, with members engaging with him during and after the meeting ended. Some fun was mixed in, with prize giveaways of NEC branded items and other promotional gifts, as well as the big prize of a drone. Congratulations to Aaron Siegal of TXI Corporation, winner of the drone!

NEC plans to host more SpiceCorps meetings around the country several times a year. Be sure to subscribe to the NEC Today blog or follow us on Spiceworks for insightful posts on IT and Communications industry topics, updates on NEC products and services, and dates, times and locations of upcoming NEC sponsored SpiceCorps meetings.

 

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At Advantage 2016— We Discovered the Power of the Smart Enterprise

Posted by John Wise on Posted in Conference, Events Tagged , , , ,

More than 400 attendees from the NEC community – top channel partners, consultants, analysts, sponsors, and staff from North America and South America, all met this last month in Ponte Vedra, Florida,near Jacksonville, to “Discover the Power of the Smart Enterprise.” This was the overarching theme of NEC’s 2016 Advantage Executive Conference (Advantage).

Advantage is a highly anticipated annual 3-day conference event where NEC’s key players, dealers, sponsors, vendors, guests and top industry consultants get together to learn and share their interest in business enterprise technology.  Hands-on demonstrations of the latest product and service developments are available, along with opportunities to participate in informational and inspiring sessions led by the “best of the best” in the industry.

NEC’s Smart Enterprise

This year, the spotlight was on Smart Enterprise communications and IT Infrastructures, with a range of sessions focusing on current workforce environment trends, the latest in NEC unified communications solutions, the stability of NEC’s high availability servers, Contact Center challenges being met, and presentations on the importance of real relationships with our customers and why Smart Enterprise solutions make sense for them.

NEC’s Smart Enterprise is best described as a platform of solutions focused on improving safety, security and operational efficiency for our customers.  In the UC and IT space, it’s a broad set of technologies, products and solutions that are truly empowering for our enterprise customers. Smart Enterprise provides an IT communications infrastructure and application layer that allows a more predictive business that customers can also operate at a lower cost, and so empowers them to be more competitive.

Smart Enterprise solutions help our customers solve their real-world business issues, and will streamline and even innovate business processes. Basically, Smart Enterprise delivers a stable and reliable ICT solution, freeing our customers to focus on their productivity and on meeting and exceeding their business goals.

And the Winner Is…

Advantage is a multi-purpose event for learning, experiencing, sharing, socializing, and recognizing extraordinary partners, so always climaxes with NEC’s Sales and Marketing Leadership Awards, presented to the Top Ten Channel Partners.  This recognition is not only for outstanding business performance, but also their relationship and involvement level within their local communities. The Awards are an important part of NEC’s “Orchestrating a Brighter World” mission, honoring successful partners who have achieved a high level of customer satisfaction and are making a notable difference in the lives of those around them.

Once more, we’d like to applaud this year’s NEC SML Award honorees:

  • Advanced Communication Solutions (ACS)
  • Arrow SI
  • Business Communications Systems, Inc.
  • Epitome Networks
  • Forerunner Technologies
  • Hawaiian Telcom
  • nDataStor
  • NetServe365
  • Okanagan Telephone Company
  • Positive Business Solutions, Inc. (PBSI)
  • Scharfstein, South America

 

In Conclusion

NEC’s 2016 Advantage Executive Conference was an uplifting time of learning, fun, and inspiration, an opportunity to concentrate on the latest technology for business communication, workforce productivity, and reliable business continuity, with a successful blending of education on customer needs and NEC solutions, great social interaction, and receiving the positive messaging of NEC’s Smart Enterprise.

Essentially, the message is that Smart Enterprise brings together and orchestrates the best, specifically tailored solutions, to meet our customer’s individual business needs, and, ultimately, to help brighten their world. And that’s the real NEC mission.

If you want to hear more on the conference, many of the consultants and analysts who were in attendance – including Dave Michels, Jon Arnold, Steve Leaden, and more – gathered for a UC Strategies podcast

YMCA of Greater Louisville: Using UC to Transform the Guest Experience

Posted by Bryan Williams on Posted in Unified Communications Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This powerful narrative about the YMCA of Greater Louisville shows how the organization’s use of NEC unified communications (UC) transforms the guest experience. YMCA management and staff share how NEC technology is empowering employees to connect more closely with members—resulting in a better experience for the Y’s membership.

Utilizing a newly built contact center that serves 17 branch locations across three counties, the YMCA increased onsite productivity by effectively handling on average 12,000 calls a month from a single remote location. Which leaves more time for staff to personally interact with their local members. Learn more about the YMCA’s story presented in their own words.

NEC technology can help other organizations grow their businesses through unified communications solutions. Are you ready? Let us know as we are ready to help.