Read this article in your language IT | EN | DE | ES
Recently I have been working frequently within the financial vertical. The interesting part about working in different industries is correctly identifying their Unified Communications priorities and then addressing them accordingly. What I have found while working in this particular industry is that a minute can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars and those outages are quite nearly considered unacceptable. I know that many of you will say that doesn’t just apply to the financial industry and I would agree but in this industry more so than any other the savvy end-user holds the UC engineer to the fire at any outage.
Even though stability and reliability ring the loudest in the financial industry these users are a savvy and demanding bunch. Some of the key departments you will find in any small to medium size financial company are the Research, Sales, Investment Bankers, and Brokers. Each of these departments varies in what they need from a Unified Communications system.
The Research departments depend heavily on getting and relaying their work to both internal and external users. In times like these you have to use all the resources you can to address concerns of users in the business and attempt to save them money. The economy has made me a more resourceful administrator and the user much more demanding. During the hay-day research departments thought nothing of calling a third party company and record a message to have them relay to all their clients. Today research thinks nothing of coming to me and demanding I find a way for them to do this and replicate the exact procedure they are currently using.
The investment bankers and sales teams need conferencing and all kinds of conferencing from basic ad hoc to video conferencing. The sales teams use the Cisco CBarge feature more than any other client. God forbid you don’t have conferencing resources setup correctly with these guys on your system. Video is used extensively with-in Investment banking whether it is end-user video on the desk level or larger conference room video for presentations. These folks like their video.
The brokers are a different breed entirely and rely on these mammoth phones that go by the name of turrets. Turrets can be considered the phone on steroids and I am not talking some simple HGH to get you back on the field type steroid I am thinking of the WWE, pimple inducing type. Turrets can have up-to 600 speed dials, direct dials, intercoms, or broadcast channels. They don’t work on extensions like most phones no they work on something called a TRID. Hunt groups can sometimes be a difficult concept in Cisco world let me not even touch it with respect to turrets. When you press Hunt on a turret it searches for the first line you can use just to make a call. When you press what you think is a speed dial it is actually a direct line to some other company who thinks that connecting with you shouldn’t take longer than 1 sec. If you want to buy, sell, or give a morning report on the company who reported the night before you have a button that is configured to a “hoot and holler” system. If these guys want to have the audio for a TV channel running to their phone it can be done. If the market is open these folks don’t move from their desks.
Subscribe