Many business thought leaders are exploring strategies to leverage their branch assets to increase revenues and improve the branch office customer experience by mitigating branch office constraints. These thought leaders are collectively thinking in terms of Branch 2.0, which from a real estate and staffing point of view is a smaller footprint but rich in information technology (IT). Branch 2.0 offers a solution to the business challenges of staff skill levels, right here, right now customer transaction requirements, broad lack of loyalty thanks to increased competition and using the large branch office footprint to up- and cross-sell customers while gaining new ones. The communications industry is driving new value in branch offices with Branch 2.0, which leverages communications and IT to remove the above branch office constraints and improve corporate performance. The combination of business and communication technology trends is creating the next generation branch office. The Branch Office 2.0 concept and its associated business value are developed in white paper available for download at http://lippisreport.com/2008/08/business-value-creation-through-branch-20/ which contains industry recommendations so that business and IT leaders may exploit it for corporate advantage. We use retail and financial services as examples, but Branch 2.0 may be applied to any branch or store facility in any geographic theater.

Two major enterprise trends are combining to deliver greater communication options, that being unified communications and smart mobile endpoints such as Blackberrys Symbian, Iphones and Windows mobile devices. Enterprise mobility solutions are delivering greater value to dual mode smart mobile endpoints thanks to 802.11 WLANs, 3G, fixed mobile convergence and unified communications. In short a mobile endpoint is being equipped with the same services, features and functions that were once isolated and fixed upon a desktop phone. Luc Roy VP of Enterprise Mobility at Siemens joins me to discuss mobile unified communications.

Located just south of Vancouver, Delta School District includes 33 schools spread out over 60 miles. Having initially deployed consumer-grade Wi-Fi technology, Delta quickly realized that it needed industrial strength management and WLAN performance to meet the needs of educators, students and administrators. Its first enterprise WLAN provider offered central management improvements, but Delta was only able to sprinkle single access points (APs) in most of its schools, equipping some with several APs and a centralized controller. Adding more APs meant adding more controllers and backhauling traffic from each AP to a central site over a WAN connection. Then Delta switched to Ruckus Wireless and gained a professional-grade WLAN system that could be centrally managed, was quick to deploy and offered unique design attributes thanks to meshing. Paul Parsons of the Electronic and Computer Services (ECS) Group within Delta School District is my guest as we talk about Delta’s business requirements, motivation and experience with a new WLAN solution by Ruckus Wireless.