Managed services provider Unified Office has a unique angle on the Internet of Things. It’s leveraging its position as a business communications provider to outfit its voice services customers with a solution to connect, monitor, and manage their other equipment as well.
That new IoT solution is called the Total Connect Now Operations Performance Suite. And it’s an add-on to Unified Office’s Visual Performance Suite.
Unified Office is bringing this solution to the quick-serve restaurant industry first. In fact, the company has been working with Domino’s Pizza in an early application of this technology.
Food service is a highly regulated industry. It’s also one that can easily lose money due to waste. TCNOPS addresses both issues by connecting and monitoring things like prep table and refrigeration temperatures so they comply with regulations and avoid spoilage.
Unified Office will report on and do trending analysis of real-time information as part of this solution. It can also provide customers with alerts via text or whatever means a customer chooses if conditions fall outside of established benchmarks. And it provides businesses with an audit trail of what happened so they can revisit it later.
This new solution is a logical extension to Unified Office’s existing business, says Ray Pasquale, CEO and founder of Unified Office, because humans aren’t the only things that communicate – IoT things do too.
Beyond the restaurant industry, this solution is also a match for the hospitality industry, which could use it to monitor and control in-room thermostats and HVAC systems, adds Pasquale. That way hotels could automate thermostats so they return to a certain temperature when the customer checks out, and they could ensure system settings are always cool enough to avoid the growth of mold, for example, he says.
Unified Office has partnered with Graybar and RTS to put together the TCNOPS solution. Graybar purchases and packages the needed hardware (which includes a Samsung sensor kit) and ships it to the site. Electrical contracting firm RTS then installs the hardware at the customer site. And Unified Office sells the total solution, and delivers the connectivity and analytics on an ongoing basis.
Tom Phelan, CTO & VP of Technology at Unified Office will present during “Service Provider Trends and Topics” at ITEXPO this week in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The session, Monetizing Communications Services in a Digital World on Fri. at 9 a.m. will look at how traditional CSPs can adapt their models to compete in today’s OTT world without compromising scalability, performance, or security.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
