How Today’s Touchless Technology Gives Customers Options and Control

Creating a digital profile streamlines online shopping in significant ways. The convenience promotes future orders and customer loyalty. Imagine how delightful it will be when brick and mortar stores enable the popular option for in-person shopping. Today, creating a Digital ID is possible with NEC’s I:Delight platform.

For example, when a shopper saves their preferences and payment information to a personal profile accessible from their mobile device and provides authorization with rapid and accurate facial recognition, stored customer loyalty information can be instantly applied. Thus, empowering customers to control their digital data and how it is used, while their customer experience is enhanced with fewer touches and less risk.

All of this can be achieved with NEC I:Delight, a highly secure and scalable Digital ID management platform. Using NEC’s award-winning face recognition algorithms, this robust, cloud-native platform streamlines ordering and payment at quick service restaurants; facilitates check-in at next-generation hotels; and provides expedited entry and payments at entertainment venues and stadiums.

NEC I:Delight also enables touchless passenger checkpoints from curb-to-gate at airports, provides streamlined access to office buildings, and verifies patients and authorizes staff at healthcare facilities. The platform is interoperable, scalable and can be used by many industries to provide long-term value, transforming the customer experience.

Star Alliance, the world’s largest airline alliance, which includes a coalition of 26 member airlines, uses NEC I:Delight to power its growing biometric passenger processes and modernize its entire travel ecosystem. In addition to curb-to-gate verification, passengers who opt-in through the Star Biometrics app will be able to use their Digital ID for VIP lounge access, wayfinding, airport purchases, transportation fares, hotel check-in, attraction passes and more. All without showing a boarding pass or opening their wallet.

With NEC I:Delight, the customer maintains control of their Digital ID and its uses. Customers can change profile settings as needed and opt-out just as easily.

For more detail check out this three-page preview our whitepaper that provides more in-depth information about NEC’s Digital ID platform.

Click here to learn more or fill out the form below to download the entire whitepaper.

See how Digital IDs can work for you. Take a guided virtual tour and discover the frictionless, touchless capabilities of I:Delight by visiting our Virtual Customer Experience Center.

How Peavey Electronics Keeps the Music Alive with UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP & RECOVER

If you’ve seen live music, you’re sure to recognize the Peavey® logo. As one of the largest manufacturers of musical instruments, amplifiers and audio systems, Peavey® Electronics has helped musicians and audiophiles to achieve high-quality sound production since the 1960s. In the pursuit of perfection and reliability, the company wanted to improve the resiliency and security of its network infrastructure and critical data in its SAP HANA® implementation.

Peavey turned to NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE® BACKUP (BaaS) and RECOVER (DRaaS) managed service offering after the challenges with their legacy backup and recovery approach.

Peavey’s Critical Data Requirements

Peavey uses SAP business warehouse software to generate daily business reporting pertaining to areas including finance, inventory, and sales. Notably, Peavey uses SAP HANA® to deliver real-time inventory information to its global network of distributors and resellers. It relies on SAP HANA for up-to-the-minute product availability and inventory levels for customers. Without this information, channel partners do not have access to inventory information and might move to another vendor’s product to purchase. In today’s fast-paced, online-centric marketplace, this is especially a threat for Peavey.

Modernizing SAP HANA Backups

Peavey required a modernized approach to its backups to reduce the administrative load on their small IT team. In addition, they looked to reduce backup errors, increase protection against cyber security attacks and ensure complete system backups with no performance impact. Another added bonus of working with NEC was the availability of modern infrastructure, including cloud-hosted storage.

Peavey chose NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE® BACKUP and RECOVER managed service offering to meet these objectives and more. The NEC managed service offering allowed Peavey to:

  • Automate SAP HANA native full and incremental Backups
  • Implement automated data archiving
  • Enhance cyber security by implementing the 3-2-1 rule of data protection best practices
  • Include additional disaster recovery capabilities against natural disasters and cyber-attacks through optional UNIVERGE BLUE RECOVER without the purchase of additional systems
  • Centralize visibility and control via the UNIVERGE BLUE COMMAND CENTER

The biggest value that NEC has brought to Peavey is the ability to offload tasks and responsibilities of its IT team. Peavey has strengthened its data protection at lower operating costs and IT administrative overhead.

Read the Full NEC-Peavey Case Study

The NEC UNIVERGE BLUE Difference

NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP (Backup as a Service) and RECOVER (Disaster Recovery as a Service) offers control and compliance to meet data protection best practices. The managed service offering is based on industry-leading backup software such as Commvault® and Veeam to deliver backup and recovery services. The service also leverages NEC HYDRAstor® distributed grid storage systems that are hosted off-premises in Iron Mountain® data centers. Managed services are provided 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days per year via NEC’s Network Operations Center. NEC will also configure and tailor the solution to meet or exceed your business’s unique requirements.

Typical benefits provided with NEC UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP and RECOVER include:

  • Meeting 3-2-1 rule data protection best practices
  • Offloading tasks from IT Staff
  • Reducing insider threats
  • Providing proof of best practices for Cyber Security Insurance

Learn about NEC UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP and RECOVER from this Evaluator Group Product Brief.

Read the NEC-Peavey Electronics Solution Case Study

With the help of NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP and RECOVER managed services, Peavey can keep the music alive while NEC patches servers, replaces old hardware and provides secure backup and reliable data recovery. Be sure to read the NEC-Peavey Electronics Case Study to learn more about how the companies worked together to secure the critical data necessary to ensure continued success.

To learn more about NEC UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP and RECOVER, download this Evaluator Group Product Brief. Or to become authorized to sell the solution, request authorization and take the training available in the NEC Learning Management System.

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NEC Announces Dr. Kathleen Kiernan as Permanent President of NEC National Security Systems

Today the entire NEC family celebrates the announcement of Dr. Kathleen Kiernan as permanent President of NEC National Security Systems, our FOCI-mitigated subsidiary that provides advanced technology solutions to the federal government. Raffie Beroukhim, Senior Vice President and Chief Experience Officer of NEC Corporation of America spoke for all of us when he said, “Kathleen is absolutely the right fit for us.”

Beroukhim went on to say, “In her almost three decades of experience in federal law enforcement, she’s seen it all and it’s that public-sector security expertise we want guiding us well into the future.”

NEC NSS was created to provide the world-class innovations of NEC Corporation in a specialized manner to the United States government. This mission has established the company as a leading provider of digital identity solutions and AI technology across defense, intelligence, law enforcement, homeland security and other agencies.

Kathleen KiernanWith Dr. Kiernan at the helm, we know NSS will continue to do all this and more.

While she has served as Interim President of NEC NSS for just two months, Dr. Kiernan’s combination of leadership experience and industry expertise has already proved invaluable to the company.

Dr. Kiernan is a 29-year veteran of Federal Law Enforcement and one of our country’s foremost experts in threat detection. Having previously served as Assistant Director for the Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), she knows firsthand what it takes to lead expert organizational strategy based in intelligence.

Her impressive resume reaches further, as Dr. Kiernan is also the Founder and CEO of Kiernan Group Holdings (KGH), a women-owned global consulting firm specializing in intelligence, law enforcement and national security. She is a recognized expert in strategic thinking, strategy development, and facilitating critical incident management exercises for senior leaders across public and private sector organizations.

You can see why she was our first choice for the position.

On making the transition to permanent President, Dr. Kiernan stated, ”These past two months at NEC NSS have been simply outstanding. Our focus on cloud-enabled digital identity management solutions and cutting-edge technology is being at the speed of need in the global environment, while also providing shared value to our communities is an unbeatable combination.”

As technology and our industry continues to evolve, visionary leadership that can see what’s coming around the corner and adapt as needed is more important than ever. In the years to come as NEC NSS continues to grow under Dr. Kiernan’s leadership you’ll want to stay up-to-date with news emerging from the company’s social media channels. You can follow NEC NSS on Twitter at @NECNSSFed and on their LinkedIn page.

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2020 Disruptions Propel NEC’s Digital Transformations

NEC’s 2020 Innovations Increase Safety, Business Continuity and Digital Transformations

Challenging and chaotic are choice words to describe 2020. But during the healthcare crisis and weather emergencies, everyday heroes emerged.

We applaud the frontline workers, healthcare providers and first responders. We also recognize IT and telecommunications professionals, network administrators and data managers who supported critical technology infrastructures.

The immense disruptions in 2020 propelled innovations in the way we live and work. While NEC is continuously advancing in the areas of communications, security, collaboration platforms and customer experience, we redoubled our efforts last year.

Safer, secure contactless touchpoints
As we move forward, public health and safety remain top priorities. For individuals and organizations, technologies that support both frictionless access and social distancing measures are now more important than ever.

That’s the reason we prioritized development of “touchless” touchpoints to reduce the spread of infectious diseases. Our revolutionary approach to Digital Transformation (DX), NEC I:Delight, includes an advanced, secure and scalable platform to support contactless, yet robust customer experiences.

Although we began our journey toward touchless technology long before the current crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic reinforces our commitment to continue advancing our biometric and AI solutions for aviation, immigration, retail and hospitality industries, healthcare, education and more.

Screening travelers to ensure health and security
A highlight of 2020 is the Hawaii Department of Transportation selecting an NEC-led team for deployment of a thermal screening solution at all five state-run airports.

NEC NeoFace® Thermal Express leverages thermal sensing and facial recognition technologies to detect elevated body temperature (EBT) and alert screeners to anyone with a temperature of 100.4 or greater.

In addition, we introduced a partnership with SITA, a global provider of IT and communications infrastructure for 80% of the world’s airports. NEC’s Advanced Identity Matcher – Edge Source (AIM-ES) technology uses the most accurate face matching algorithms as validated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

In combination with our NeoFace algorithm, we deliver an all-in-one solution capable of creating recognition galleries and templates as well as providing identity matching and scoring. It easily integrates with the SITA Smart Path whole-journey identity management solution, which creates a specialized application for airport travelers. Because NEC’s I:Delight uses an individual’s unique ID, it is more secure than other online money transfer services.

New generation cloud communications and collaborations
The way businesses work has changed. Corporations must be flexible and ready to adapt to teleworking at a moment’s notice.

For 120 years, NEC has pioneered Information and Communications Technologies, including Smart Enterprise cloud computing and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). As the current global market share leader in on-premises business phone systems, we were pleased to announce a global partnership with Intermedia, a leading provider of cloud-based communications solutions.

Our collaborations with Intermedia launched a new generation of our UNIVERGE BLUE® cloud communications portfolio. The new UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT and UNIVERGE BLUE ENGAGE solutions are reliable and easy to deploy, while remaining highly scalable and extremely cost-effective.

In addition to advancing business continuity, more employees will be able to work safely from home while increasing their productivity. The new UNIVERGE BLUE is also easy for channel partners to sell, install and support.

Resellers, check out 8 Great Reasons to Become a UNVERGE BLUE Channel Partner.

Reduce telecommunications costs
With the surge in network connectivity requirements, businesses are looking for ways to control costs while maintaining reliability and security.

We launched Network Connect to help cut enterprise telecommunications costs up to 30% or more annually. The intelligent call routing solution uses AI and machine learning to establish the most optimal call path from hundreds of global carriers.

You don’t need to invest in additional infrastructure or change anything about your business operations. NEC’s Network Connect is the first call-routing solution that gives enterprise access to the wholesale telecom market.

NEC Visionary Week
Another area that we reimagined in 2020 is NEC’s iEXPO. NEC Visionary Week was a virtual event packed with powerful insights to fuel future decisions. Featuring global problem solvers and tech influencers, the agenda included ideas for conquering COVID-19 and carving out a new normal, harnessing AI, 5G and digital transformations to improve economies, business operations and our societies.

If you missed Visionary Week in December, you can still watch the enlightening content on-demand until January 30th. Click here to sign-up now.

As we look forward to 2021 and beyond, we thank you for your partnership. Our commitment to innovations, digital transformation, safety, security and business continuity remains steadfast. Working together, we can build greater agility and resilience in enterprise systems to create a healthier future. Happy New Year!

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3 Questions Answered about IT Modernization in Government

Government-Mobility2014 marked the beginning of the Infrastructure Revolution for several industries, many of which are following in the pre-emptive footsteps of the national government.

In February 2010, the Department of Defense created the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) to reverse the historic growth of Federal data centers. The FDCCI has been seeking to curb this unsustainable increase by reducing the cost of data center hardware, software, and operations; shifting IT investments to more efficient computing platforms; promoting the use of Green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers; and increasing the IT security posture of the government.

Since then, the government has launched an IT modernization effort across departments which includes acquisition and deployment of more secure, collaborative, and mobile technologies—along with their associated skill sets and capabilities—to replace legacy environments.

By shutting down and consolidating under-performing technologies in the Federal inventory, taxpayers stand to save billions of dollars because of curbed spending on underutilized infrastructure. The smartest enterprises will follow suit, carefully architecting their path to modernization, leveraging key partners and modern technology architectures to create a more agile, secure IT environment.

What opportunities does modernization offer?

Legacy networking, communications and applications have become a significant IT and business problem in most industry IT departments. Not only do they require consistent maintenance from someone with a skill set that fewer and fewer people possess, they also carry a high cost of ownership and are difficult to modify when meeting ongoing business demands. Worse, with little leverage across these technologies, they are often forced to remain siloed instances, providing separate benefits to converging infrastructures.

IT modernization represents an opportunity for the evolution of government organizations’ (and others as well) existing application and infrastructure software, the goal being to align IT with forward-looking business strategies.

What are the immediate benefits of modernization?

While the government is actively modernizing its IT infrastructure, they will begin to find that they can react more quickly to the ever-changing environments (business, economic, political, etc). There are many results the public sector can expect from the process of modernizing. Namely:

  1. Intelligence – with converged infrastructures, including SDNs, virtualization, and distributed applications, leading to complete software-defined data centers with virtualization from desktop-to-network-to-applications.
  2. Agility – via improved standards for infrastructure programmability, data structure interoperability and fast infrastructure provisioning, leading to a more agile IT organization
  3. Alignment – by enabling IT practices that are more in line with business objectives.
  4. Responsiveness – as business changes create flux in organization size, location, and performance, IT is continually challenged to adapt at the speed of your business—a modern infrastructure puts IT in good stead to align with these changes.
  5. Flexibility and resilience – with systems that adapt automatically and recover from failure more quickly.
  6. Energy efficienciency – with technology and systems designed to reduce energy consumption.

To get the maximum strategic benefit from modernization, it is important to base your improved system on an architecture that is built on open standards and deployed on open systems. Just as important, is seeking holistic architectural thinking among your vendor suppliers that help you consider how a converged infrastructure can benefit your business.

What are the long-term benefits of modernization?

The success or failure of a consolidation/modernization initiative achieving long-term ROI depends on each organization’s goals. For many public sector businesses, long-term goals include: enhanced security, consolidating the infrastructure, and enhancing mobility.

Enhanced Security

Streamlining IT processes creates an agile IT infrastructure more capable of leveraging existing organizational vehicles for rapid delivery of tasks/orders. But none of this matters without a strong security platform that can withstand the stresses of and better respond to today’s cybersecurity threats.

A modernized IT platform must be hardened and able to detect, respond to, and report information security incidents, as well as developing situational awareness, utilizing authentication, reinforcing reciprocity, and leveraging automated assessments.

Infrastructure Consolidation

Today’s workforce demands applications that are always accessible and work consistently from any device.  Public-sector organizations that consolidate their enterprise networks—ultimately standardizing IT platforms, consolidating data and network operations centers, and optimizing architectures—create an infrastructure that is easier to manage and more secure in order to help support active user involvement.

Mobility Enhancement

As with most other industries, there is a significant push for both central and local government and associated not-for-profit agencies to move towards more flexible modes of working. Providing location agnostic access to data is a hot topic for the public sector as is the desire to provide better standards of service to employees and customers. Transparent communication has the potential to accelerate productivity and help realize mission requirements—provided it can be achieved in the face of the escalating austerity of ever-changing security measures.

Modernizing and consolidating IT infrastructures helps address unique resource challenges surrounding public sector enterprise mobility. Consolidation also enables government agencies to implement scalable enterprise mobile management solutions that extend to users, devices, applications, content, data, email and networks.

JITC Certified Unified Communications

Defense agencies are under increasing pressure to bring their disparate web technologies together.  That’s why the DoD has created the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) certification, so all IT investments—including collaborative communications solutions—can be protected.

NEC’s UNIVERGE®3C solution has been thoroughly vetted by the JITC against the highest government standards, and has been added to the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Session Controller Approved Products List (APL) for Unified Capabilities.

The APL is a single, consolidated list of products that have been certified and approved for use in DoD networks to provide end-to-end unified capabilities. UNIVERGE 3C is certified as a Local Session Controller, referred to by NEC as Unified Capabilities Session Controller (UC SC).

The JITC evaluation process is highly respected by commercial organizations because JITC testing meets and frequently exceeds enterprise security levels. With Security Officers confident in the solution, the deployment process can be accelerated.

JITC certification requires compliance with hundreds of security measures as well as the ability to withstand extreme attacks on the software. Being JITC accredited means that we fully meet US DoD requirements and often surpass the security best practices of global commercial customers.

Visit us at Enterprise Connect booth 1121 to learn more about NEC’s JITC-Certified UNIVERGE 3C solution.