I recently flew from Heathrow to San Diego to attend Cisco Live. About an hour in and the cabin crew started serving dinner. It was a full flight and, unfortunately for me, I was seated right in the middle of the economy section. As the cabin crew converged on my row it became clear they didn't have enough food.

"Not a problem", I thought to myself, "maybe they'll get me some of the nicer food from the front of the plane!"

Nearly 45 minutes later, as my fellow passengers finished their meals and settled into a movie, there was still no food. But perhaps more frustrating -no one from the crew had talked to me about what was happening. If this had been a restaurant, I'd have got up and left. But at 35,000 feet I had nowhere to go.*

Fast forward about 72 hours...

I'm in a session at Cisco Live about how Cisco Midsize Business Solutions can power growing businesses. Seth Corriveau from SickKids Foundation was talking about how critical communication is to his organization. The SickKids Foundation is a midsized organization doing great work raising funds for SickKids hospital in Toronto.  They had been having real problems with poor-quality audio and dropped telephone calls. This was an issue for donors who call in to donate their own hard-earned cash to support the treatment of very ill children. Complaints were escalated to senior VPs at the Foundation weekly.

Corriveau had a critical situation that needed quick resolution. He solved it by upgrading their aging network infrastructure and deploying Cisco Business Edition 6000 (BE6000). He included Cisco Unified Contact Center Express for the Foundation's 15 to 20 call-center agents.  The result? They now have zero downtime!

The John Eagle Group of car dealerships in Texas had a slightly different customer-service challenge. Regular sales and executive meetings took key sales and service associates away from the showrooms for extended periods of time. This reduced valuable face-to-face time with customers.

They leveraged BE6000 and high-definition video conferencing to hold virtual meetings. This meant they could reduce unnecessary travel and maximise time with customers.

These two organizations are very different but both take advantage of the comprehensive capabilities of BE6000. It is a simple to use, manage, and deploy packaged collaboration solution. And it is an extremely flexible too!  Both were able to solve their immediate needs with BE6000. But it can scale as their collaboration priorities evolve and their organizations grow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7TLu1VEFFg

While in San Diego, I caught up with Arun Ragunathan, the product manager for Business Edition 6000. We talked with Rob Boyd from TechWiseTV about the latest enhancements to our midsized collaboration portfolio. You can see the full video below. Seth from SickKids Foundation also talks some more about how he solved his communications challenges.

*P.S.  One of the senior cabin crew did eventually speak to me and pulled together a meal which did indeed includesomeof the nicer food from the front, as well as what I suspect was some of her own lunch! And she kept checking if I needed anything else for the rest of the flight.  This personal communication more than made up for having to wait for the food.