This is the type of post that gets me excited. Today, I’m happy to feature a special customer guest author: Andrew vonNagy, CCIE #28298 (Wireless), and currently Technical Architect for a Fortune 50 retail company. Many of you may know Andrew from his active blog, Revolution Wi-Fi,  or his Twitter feed: @revolutionwifi. Stay with us over the next two weeks as Andrew offers his take on the intersection of Retail and the Wireless LAN industry.

Retail Wi-Fi networks have long been dominated by inventory management applications and services that enabled a more productive workforce and leaner operations. However, brick-and-mortar retail is being disrupted due to the explosive growth from pure e-commerce competitors offering [often] lower prices and a more personalized shopping experience. In addition, the e-commerce sales channel offers deeper product information, community reviews, and greater levels of localization and customization that resonate with consumers.

Brick and mortar retail must adapt to compete in this new environment. A key component of this adaptation is delivering new IT solutions while leveraging the physical assets of the storefront, mixing the benefits of in-store product “touch-and-feel” with the personalization of e-commerce shopping. Merging these two worlds together will create an enhanced shopping experience through the use of mobile Internet devices, often connected through Wi-Fi networks.

This week, we will cover the first of 5 trends driving Wi-Fi growth and new capabilities in retail organizations:

Trend 1: Consumer Interaction and Business Analytics

Physical retailers have the most influence over consumer purchase decisions in the store, when they are standing in front of the product they are weighing whether or not to buy. Historically, this has been through in-aisle marketing and signage. However, customers are increasingly equipped with mobile Internet access and turning to external sources of information in real-time while within a retail store. This has been coined the emergence of the “smart shopper”. These external sources of information are much more comprehensive than what the retailer can provide through traditional in-aisle marketing and signage, and this leaves the physical retailer at a big disadvantage.

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Tags: guest wi-fi, location based services, mobile, mobile payments, NFC, retail, smart shopper, smartphone, wi-fi, wifi, wireless, wireless LAN

Otherwise known as: “Industry Leaders Expand Customer Choice and Reduces Total Cost of Ownership”.

A press release out of Honeywell’s Baveno, Italy site late last month told of Honeywell’s announcement that it is offering wireless access point[s] (the Aironet 1552 Access Points to be precise) from Cisco -- “global leader in networking”, as part of Honeywell’s OneWireless™ solution of industrial wireless products and services.

The Press Release stated that “These solutions provides customers seeking to implement a long-term, plant-wide wireless infrastructure at their industrial facilities with industry leading technology and support from two of the largest and most established wireless solutions providers in the world.”

It was all about Cisco’s new Aironet 1552 Access Point together with Honeywell’s OneWireless network, providing wireless coverage for both Wi-Fi applications and ISA100.11a field instruments under a single infrastructure and minimizing total cost of ownership.  Read More »

Tags: 1552, Diederik Mols, honeywell, honeywell networking, Industrial Automation, Michael Fabian, OneWireless, pcn, process control networks, Raymond Rogowski, wireless

If you happened to have your Thanksgiving meal last week with a person of Greek heritage, you may have heard them toast “Yia mas”, that literally means “to our health”. And that is exactly what I am thankful for each day, my family’s health.

I am also thankful for the health of our wireless business, which is going great thanks to professionals such as doctors, and nurses that want to want to use their personal devices (smartphones and tablets) at work.

At Cisco we have long been talking about how we enable this proliferation of devices in the workplace and how we make it easier for IT to onboard and troubleshoot these “un-managed” devices. We also provide a robust wireless infrastructure that enables these professionals by providing the best possible mobile experience. But the trend of personal devices in the workplace does pose a valid concern: “As more and more doctors start using their personal iPads at work, will my patient data be secure?”

Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to look at some data over the long weekend to better understand how healthcare data breaches occur. This is by no means a scientific analysis, I just crunched some data I downloaded from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website (hss.gov), so the findings are not conclusive, but rather indicative of what is happening. The data represents HIPAA breaches of 500 or more records per incident over the past 2-year period.

Here is what the data says: Read More »

Tags: 802.11n, compliance, doctors, healthcare, HIPAA, iPad, mobile devices, security, tablet, wireless

Today, at Höganäs North America, the high-performance Cisco network delivers the day-to-day voice and data communications needed for around-the-clock communications and network connectivity that are vital to Höganäs’ staff for not only daily operations but to ensure the safety of their 80 plant employees: activities such as enabling crane operators servicing furnaces to alert nearby teams to help ensure their safety for example.

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Tags: business benefits, Case Study, Cisco CleanAir technology, Cisco Unified Wireless Network, clean air, cleanair, Höganäs, Höganäs cisco, Höganäs networkinhg, LAN, Manufacturing, videolink, wcs, wireless, wireless network, wlan

By Steven Shepard, Contributing Columnist

A couple of weeks ago I was in the bustling metropolis of Stanton, Iowa (population: 714), one of the most charming towns I have ever had the pleasure to visit. It is the home town of Mrs. Olson, the iconic figure in Folger’s Coffee commercials — which is why their water towers look so unique (see the photo insert below).

I was working with an independent telephone company client, one of about 1,300 in the U.S. — 250 of which are in Iowa. These independents are typically smaller phone companies, often family-owned, and almost always technologically-advanced.

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Tags: agriculture, corn, food, GPS, Iowa, Service Provider, telecommunications, wireless