First Coffee for October 10, 2005

David Sims : First Coffee
David Sims
| CRM, ERP, Contact Center, Turkish Coffee and Astroichthiology:

First Coffee for October 10, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of mid-morning here on Columbus Day, and here’s hoping you’re having a relaxing day off. Hey, we never rest here at First CoffeeSM. The music is a nice five-CD sampler of Miles Davis, with Birth of The Cool and Kind Of Blue, among others:

There’s not a whole lot of happenin’ news, but here’s what’s going on:

There goes the Washington Redskins undefeated season.
...

LightPointe, a designer and manufacturer of high-speed outdoor wireless products, is announcing that Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the famed hospital and cancer institute, has deployed the company’s Gigabit Ethernet FlightStrata optical wireless product to extend high-speed network connectivity to a new office while providing access to bandwidth-intensive digital imaging, research data and a wireless IP telephony system.

Much of the technology used in Sloan-Kettering, The largest private cancer institution in the world, is state-of-the-art, of course. “Wireless technologies are a critical component of our New York City facilities,” says Patricia C. Skarulis, vice president of information systems and chief information officer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “The center’s advanced network includes VoIP, mobile wireless workstations, widespread WiFi coverage, PDA scanners and high-speed optical wireless links that connect buildings and facilities located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.”

The new FlightStrata integrates with the institute’s existing LightPointe FlightSpectrum optical wireless links that connect other campus buildings, including one housing a high-speed network between Sloan-Kettering’s research scientists and peers at nearby Rockefeller University.

In all cases, the optical wireless network extensions carry high-speed voice, data and digital imaging to the remote locations for campus-wide access to its IP telephony system, all-digital Picture Archiving Communications System and other leading-edge technologies without incurring additional significant capital expenditures.

Might as well keep the medical theme going: TheraDoc Inc., a medical informatics company, is installing its clinical decision-support software at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. TheraDoc will integrate its software with the hospital’s existing information systems to enable real-time monitoring of electronic medical records and automated delivery of actionable patient information and therapeutic recommendations.

Jewish Hospital is the first in Kentucky to implement TheraDoc’s software. This implementation is part of the hospital’s efforts to improve patient outcomes (nice euphemism there – “Nuss, the paddles, quick, we needta improve this patient’s outcome!”), enhance infection control and ensure appropriate antibiotic stewardship.

In non-medical news Aderant, a provider of business and financial management software for professional services organizations, is announcing at its Momentum 2005 User Conference the introduction of Aderant Expert, what company officials are billing as “a new, unified brand identity for the company’s existing solution suites.”

It’s an integrated practice management system based on Microsoft .NET that provides, Aderant officials say, “professional services firms with functionality for financial management, client relationship management, practice automation, business intelligence, and mobility.”

The stereotype of professional services organizations, such a law offices and medical practices, is that they’re not exactly on the cutting edge of business technology, using multiple, disconnected products that only address specific needs or business processes. Hence they frequently end up with a patchwork of products, silos of information which don’t really help execs get the clear grasp the technology sales rep promised of what’s happening to their business and using that information to improve their operations and increase profits.

Of course at any firm using multiple applications from different vendors makes your IT staff maintain custom integrations and manually extract and input data from system to system, and forces your users to learn and use different applications for normal business usage.

Michael J. Simmons, Chief Executive Officer for Aderant says Aderant Expert is engineered specifically for professional services firms caught in such technological backwaters, touting it as a single product “from a single vendor, that addresses their most pressing business needs, helping them increase responsiveness, improve productivity, and maximize profitability while significantly reducing risk and complexity.”

A tip of the coffee pot to Dr. Sophie Vandebroek, named to the position of chief technology officer and president of the Xerox Innovation Group, effective Jan. 1. Len Parker will succeed Vandebroek as chief engineer.

According to Xerox officials Vandebroek will drive Xerox’s long-term research and development strategy. Xerox laboratories have turned out such innovations as the laser printer, copier and fax and a varied selection of digital color printers, multifunction devices and document-intensive workflow products.

She succeeds Dr. Herve Gallaire, who will retire at the end of this year after a 13-year career with Xerox. Vandebroek has been the company’s chief engineer and vice president of the Xerox Engineering Center. In her new role, she will oversee the company’s worldwide research and technology centers and teams of scientists and engineers with expertise in areas like color marking systems, materials, digital imaging, and document management services.

And kudos to Centurion Wireless Technologies, a unit of Laird Technologies, and designer and manufacturer of antennas and batteries for wireless communications, who are announcing having shipped their billionth handset antenna.

Centurion’s been supplying handset antennas to handset manufacturers, ODMs/OEMs, contract manufacturers and design houses since 1991. The explosive growth in mobile phones has been a great wave for Centurion to ride.

Non-Americans, naturally, are busy today. Israeli firm ECI Telecom is announcing an agreement with Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, a government-owned utility company in Costa Rica, to provide it with an advanced backbone network across Costa Rica, enabling telecommunication traffic routing throughout the country.

This turnkey project calls for ECI to deploy a complete optical transmission network and the entire infrastructure installation, based on its XDM Multi-Service Provisioning Platform. The network will provide ICE with the needed capacity to deliver voice and data services to fixed and mobile subscribers.

The project is worth $59 million. Deployment is expected to start in approximately 3 months and be completed over a 21-month period. The contract is subject to final approval by the General Comptroller of Costa-Rica. Under the terms of the contract, ECI will provide all aspects of the fiber installation and design, supply the fiber optic cables, digging of the fiber canals and ducting the fiber installation works of over 1000 km across the urban and rural areas of Costa Rica.

CSR plc is confirming that Samsung has selected its BlueCore silicon and software stack to bring advanced Bluetooth connectivity to the first Samsung GSM handsets to offer stereo streaming capability.

The SGH-E750 and SGH-E760 use CSR’s BlueCore3-ROM and proprietary BlueCore Host Software to offer wireless connectivity with other Bluetooth devices. Both handsets also wirelessly stream MP3 music via Bluetooth to the new generation of Bluetooth stereo headsets, such as Samsung’s own SBH100.

The SBH100 headset also uses CSR’s BlueCore and, as with standard mono Bluetooth headsets, also enables hands-free voice calls. The SGH-E750 and SGH-E760 are expected to be available on GSM networks worldwide in Q4 2005.

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