: Denphone Digest :: June 2009 :: Volume 1, Number 6 :

June Issue

In this issue of Denphone Digest we take a look at some of the new Accutone headsets now available from Denphone, 12 tips to help with office moves from an IT perspective, as well as some of the recent news from Polycom and Cisco.

If you work or have worked on a trading floor or in a call center you are probably familiar with using a headset instead of a handset to make telephone calls. Headsets are recommended by the American Physical Therapy Association, many chiropractors, doctors and physios as promoting good posture in the workplace. They also free up your hands to use a computer, take notes while speaking, check documents and generally be more effective when speaking with clients or colleagues.

We use headsets in the office here at Denphone, and they really do make a difference to employee performance.

Denphone stock Accutone headsets, with support for a wide range of phones including Cisco, Polycom, Nortel and Avaya.

In this issue we also take a look at office moves, something that many companies in Tokyo seem to be contemplating at the moment as they look to reduce costs following headcount reductions. With that in mind, we spoke to Toshiyuki Inoue who is Senior Co-ordinator for Office Sekkei, a leading Japanese office furniture and office planning company. We also offer 12 tips for smooth office moves from an IT perspective - sharing some of the experience we have gained helping companies move into new premises in Japan.

As ever, if you would like to see something featured in Denphone Digest, feel free to contact us and we will see what we can do for you.

In this issue:

• Presidents Corner - Huw Williams
• Introducing Office Sekkei: Japan office architect and furnishing specialists
• From the IT workbench: 12 Points for Smooth Office Moves
• Featured products: Accutone Headsets
• Around the internet
• Denphone News

Presidents Corner

Like all businesses, at Denphone we are always looking for ways to increase our efficiency and productivity. It's easy to overlook the negative impact of small things like juggling a phone handset while you are searching for a document or an email. I started using a headset about two years ago, and have found it quite liberating. I really suggest you give one a try, having two hands free while calling makes a big difference. We recommend, and sell both Accutone and Sennheiser headsets

Huw R. Williams

President

Denphone K.K.

Introducing Office Sekkei: Japan office architect and furnishing specialists

Moving or opening an office in a foreign country can be a daunting task. Especially in a country like Japan where a significant language barrier exists, finding the right office for your company is a time consuming process that can be very confusing if you don't have the right experience and the hard work doesn't stop once you have found that perfect new space. It has only just begun.

Denphone's Simon Gibson spoke to Toshiyuki Inoue recently about Office Sekkei, the company he works for, and what they have to offer to companies looking to set up an office in Japan. Office Sekkei was founded in 1973 and has model offices in Japan in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Sappora and Fukuoka as well as branches in England, France, Germany and the United States of America.

Simon: Can you tell us what is important when setting up an office in Japan?

The project manager you appoint is very important. You can choose a project manager from an architect like Office Sekkei, a real estate agency in Tokyo or from a law firm; that is quite common and they will manage the process. They will check the age of the building, make sure the paperwork is all in order, and find out about the landlord - whether they are friendly or greedy or helpful. They will help with advice like that as well as checking things like how far the building is from the station, what the power supply is, and so on.

Simon: I heard of a company who lost most of their staff because they moved from a Tokyo location to a location on an industrial site in Kanagawa. How important do you think location is in Japan?

Basically, what area you are in is very important. Tokyo has 23 wards, and being in one of those wards is fine I think. Once you get too far out of Tokyo it can become a problem, both for clients visiting your office, and for staff traveling to and from work. I know of one company that was located in Odaiba, which is a good location. They wanted to move to a cheaper location, however that turned into a big source of conflict between management and the labor union. Management weren't able to get buy in from the union and the company wasn't able to move to where they wanted to go. That kind of thing happens in Japan. It is always really important to remember to find a place near a station that your staff can travel to easily.

Simon: How can Office Sekkei help with office moves? What sort of services does your company offer?

Office Sekkei offers a wide range of office services including consulting, refurbishment, building management, planning and layouts. We can also prepare all the documents required - from proposal to quotation as well as contracts, in either English or Japanese depending on our clients needs.

We are dealers in a wide range of Japanese furniture brands as well the world famous Herman Miller brand. We can also supply used furniture where required.

Simon: What sort of trends are we seeing today in office furniture in Japan?

Lighter color woods are very popular. Darker woods such as mahogany and walnut used to be popular, but today we are seeing more people moving to lighter color furniture with woods such as maple and cherry becoming much more fashionable.

Japanese chairs, and furniture in general, can be a bit small for western people as well as younger generation Japanese people. A good chair is very important, but I don't think the desk is as important. My favorite chair is the Aeron Chair by Herman Miller and I highly recommend that to our clients from abroad.

Meeting room furniture is also changing. With the growing use of the internet, video conferencing and power point presentations, we are seeing more meeting rooms equipped to be used as media centers. So it is much more common today to find meeting room tables equipped with wire ducts to keep everything neat and tidy. Japanese furniture manufacturers tend to copy American and European manufacturers so we are now seeing features like those and that copy features from the American "neocon" furniture movement and the European "orgatech" movements showing up in Japanese furniture designs.

Work quality is much more important to Westerners than it is to Japanese; especially in more traditional Japanese companies. There is still that thing where in a Japanese company, an employee will stay late and do overtime when another employee has extra work to do, even though she has nothing to do herself (this is called "giri-zangyou"). This kind of thinking can also be seen in the office furniture used by a lot of more traditional Japanese companies - they tend just to go for the cheapest they can find and don't consider productivity gains which can be made by using top quality chairs or the problems that poor ergonomic design can cause.

Simon: Thank you for taking the time to talk to us today.

From the IT workbench: 12 Points for Smooth IT Office Moves

Simon Gibson

With the difficult current economic situation continuing, there are a lot of companies in Tokyo downsizing. This often means that the amount of office space currently occupied is in excess of a company's needs. Moving to a smaller office also allows for significant reductions in rental fees, and the corporate real estate market in Tokyo is certainly a renters market at the moment.

Moving office is also an excellent chance to renegotiate IT and telephony support contracts and to look at cost savings related to international calling plans, ISDN solutions such as Softbanks Otoku line, and general IT support contracts.

At Denphone we have a great deal of experience helping companies save money both during and after moving office. Below are some of the things to look out for and think about when making an office move - from an IT perspective.

1. Power supply - It is important to check where the power supply enters the site and the ease of connecting the power supply to your new server room. Also it is important to check the wattage available to make sure that the power supply is adequate for your needs. If you have equipment sourced overseas, you will also need to make sure what voltage it is running at, as this is quite often not documented. It is worthwhile having an electrician check the power supply to make sure everything is in order.
2. Server rack location - We recommend a separate room for your server rack(s) as this allows various advantages including a closed environment for air conditioning and air quality control, the ability to secure physical access to your equipment and also to reduce the amount of noise released into the office workspace.
3. Cabling - While it is possible to daisy chain phones and computers off the same ethernet cable run, and even to add hubs or switches at the work group desk level, this can lead to network performance problems including slow or unreliable system access. For this reason, and because it increases network security we recommend two runs of cabling to each work space. With two runs, users are still able to access the intranet or internet if they accidentally unplug the phone, and it allows the traffic to be divided in the server room at the switching level for greater redundancy and security. Ideally cabling is installed before office furniture is moved in.
4. Building access - It is important to check entrance width and height, elevator width and height (especially for server rack). Also, check with the landlord about where parking is possible and if there are any special restrictions on this.
5. Timing - Offshore / head office IT staff may need to be online so installation of servers, your PBX etcetera, needs to be timed with them.
6. Internet connection - For clients in Tokyo we recommend KVH lines, as these offer 24 by 7 bi-lingual support. If you are located in the countryside you will probably have to use NTT or KDDI lines. Generally speaking if you are using VoIP to save costs on your calls to head office outside of Japan, residential grade connections such as ADSL do not provide sufficient bandwidth or quality for business use with more than a few users. You will also need to confirm where the circuits enter the office space and where the demarcation point is.
7. Floor plan - A floor plan is very important as it allows for effective planning of things such as cabling and work station locations. It also allows the creation of a switch port plan to allocate phones and computer connections from.
8. Data backup - We recommended that a full backup of all relevant data be made prior to the move. A copy should be sent to a separate location for business contingency planning purposes; often this copy is sent to head office for safekeeping. Another copy should be kept in an easily accessible format such as blu ray and stored within the Tokyo office in case of server failure after relocation takes place.
9. Contact list. A contact list is very useful especially if connection to the companies CRM system is lost during the move. The contact list should include a list of all responsible parties - including the moving company, real estate company, US IT side, local Japan IT vendor as well as local staff and building maintenance staff.
10. Phone connection (IP, ISDN/BRI or PRI) - Moving office is a good chance to switch to a less expensive VoIP based phone system. With all digital VoIP systems, there are three main ways to connect, over an IP connection, an ISDN line (known as a INS64 line in Japan or as BRI in the rest of the world) or PRI line(s) depending on the call volume. For ISDN, we suggest either NTT or Softbank. For PRI circuits we recommend KVH. For IP connections we offer our own solution called IAX connect, but we do support the other carriers. We will be happy to discuss the options available. When moving, there may be a change in your phone numbers required. When acquiring new phone numbers (DID's or DDI's) we recommend you check whether they are transferable in any contract you sign.
11. New location address - Not specifically IT related, but choosing a location wisely is very important in Japan. For your clients it is important as they will judge your company depending on whether you are located in Shibuya or Nishi-Hachioji. And your stuff will vote with their feet if you choose to relocate to a place that is difficult to get to. Remember in Japan that most people take the train to the office - if you aren't close to a convenient station it becomes very difficult to retain staff and to hire new employees.
12. Analog phone line for fax - VoIP and asterisk-based PBX systems do support fax, but we usually recommend an analog fax line. If you do business with a lot of Japanese companies, especially more traditional companies you will find that they still send a vast majority of their documents by fax.

Featured products: Accutone Headsets

Denphone announces Accutone Reseller Launch

Denphone is proud to announce that it is partnering with global headset manufacturer, Accutone, to sell Accutone's line of professional headsets in Japan.

Headsets have an image of being used in call centers. This is not really surprising given that they increase the effectiveness of people on the phone. Employees are much more productive when using headsets - and not just in call centers - but also in sales, research, IT help desk environments or in any area where a person spends a lot of time on the phone.

One of the biggest advantages of using a headset is being able to type with both hands at the same time, meaning that it is much easier to respond to inquiries - for example, employees can compose emails as they are speaking.

And headsets are not expensive, giving excellent return on investment.

Accutone headsets work with a wide range of phones, including handsets made by Polycom, Cisco, Avaya, and Nortel.

Elegant Series TM710 Professional Monoaural Headset

The Accutone TM710 Professional Monoaural Headset features:

• Perfect balance of strong durability and lightweight
• Flexible and rotatable ear-piece provides great comfort
• Lightweight design perfect for extended usage
• Extendable soft-metal headband fits all head size
• Noise canceling microphone for high traffic noisy environments
• Acoustic shock protection circuitry
• Quick disconnecting cable included

We have been trialling this headset in the office and found it wonderful to use.

Denphone has these headsets for sale at only 10,800 yen per unit. Discounts for bulk orders are possible, so contact Denphone for a quotation.

The TM710 headset is available from the Denphone webshop: click here for the Accutone Elegant Series TM710 Professional Monoaural Headset in English, or here for the Accutone TM710J 片耳式ヘッドセット in Japanese.

Accutone AC004 Training Cable

The Accutone AC004 Training Cable is perfect for call center based business who are looking to help mentor and improve the performance of their telemarketers.

A trainer simply plugs in a second headset to this training cord and is able to listen in to the calls made by an employee, allowing fast and easy feedback to be given as well as points for improvement to be quickly noted and acted on.

This cable works with a wide range of phones including Nortel, Cisco, Polycom, Avaya and other manufacturers.

Denphone currently has these cables available for 4400 yen. Discounts for bulk orders are also possible for this unit.

The TM710 headset is available from the Denphone webshop: click here for the Accutone AC004 Y-Training Cable in English, or here for the AC004 トレーニング用Y型ケーブル in Japanese.

Denphone BCP Program

The Denphone Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Consulting Practice offers one of the broadest range of customized services in the industry.

• Information Availability Strategy
• Business Availability Plans
• Technology Availability Plans
• BCP Plan building and testing programs
• Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
• BCP Audit services

Keeping Information and People Connected is our purpose: to help protect and recover our customer’s critical data, their IT infrastructure, business processes, and their employee productivity.

The Value of Information Availability: 
Having information always available is both an IT and business imperative. It’s about remaining productive, viable, and competitive. It’s about customers, business partners, and employees at every level. It’s about anticipating threats and maintaining uptime. It’s about the readiness to exploit opportunities and grow.

Which options are right for you: You want to know that your critical systems will always be on for your business to stay in business. Managed Services and Replication Services can help address your production needs.

We deliver integrated enterprise-wide solutions choosing best of breed technologies, to craft solutions that address your specific availability needs and help optimize your spend. True information availability is built to help keep people and information connected through technology.

As part of its comprehensive portfolio of Information Availability solutions, Denphone KK offers products to support Business Continuity Planning, testing and notification functions.

With BIA, you'll gather and plan information with expertly designed surveys to assist in building and maintaining BCP plans.

With Incident Manager you'll have the ability to manage any disruption you may encounter.
With BCP Audit you will have the ability to identify and rectify gaps in your overall BCP planning program.

You can't control whether or not your organization is affected by a natural disaster, power outage, terrorist attack or other unplanned incident. But you can work to ensure that your business is prepared to respond to and recover from such issues with minimal impact.

Around the Internet

The light at the end of the tunnel - Positive news from Cisco and Polycom

The big news in IT this month is of course Cisco. Following on from the relase of Cisco blade servers, comes the announcement that Cisco will be launching a range of rackmount servers to extend its Unified Computing System. The Cisco “C Series” will offer both 1U and 2U servers with extended memory capabilities built on top of the Intel Xeon 55000 processor. These new products offer an entry point to the lower adapter and cable footprint enabled by the Unified Computing System (UCS) for companies who've built their data centers using rackmount servers instead of blades.

For many global companies who have a single vendor policy, moving to Cisco servers will be an easy choice (despite the higher cost generally of a single vendor policy), and the memory capabilities of these servers certainly make them an appealing prospect - with options including 96GB and 384GB. From an environmental perspective too, these servers make a lot of sense - it will be possible to replace a number of older servers with these, and significantly reduce the amount of electricity required to power one's datacenter.

Cisco have also been promoted to the Dow Jones industrial average, which tracks the share prices of America's top 100 companies. Justin Ryan from the Linux Journal had this to say about Cisco and the Dow:

Cisco To Join The Dow -- And Will Take Linux With It

June 4th, 2009 by Justin Ryan

Anyone who doesn't know the economy is unwell has obviously been off the planet or in a cave for the last nine months. Despite the government's attempt to stop the bleeding, one company after another has collapsed — the latest to join the list is General Motors, a fixture in American automotive culture. GM's situation, which included filing for bankruptcy this week, comes with an additional blow to the company, if not fiscally then to its corporate pride: the company's bankruptcy filing has disqualified it from inclusion in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an honor it has held for eighty-three years, a record second only to General Electric's 102 years.

GM's loss, however, is technology's gain, as one more staple in the tech lineup will take the automotive giant's place. Cisco Systems, the networking powerhouse that claims as much as a 68% share in certain areas of the networking market, will be added to the venerable index on June 8 — it will become the fifth technology firm in the current lineup, along with Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, and Microsoft. Other members of the index, which includes thirty stocks considered to be a representative sample of the overall market, include such American corporate icons as AT&T, Coca-Cola, the aforementioned General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and Walt Disney.

CEO John Chambers, speaking to reporters at the Cisco Partner Summit, called the inclusion a "tremendous honor" while acknowledging that it comes with "mixed emotions" stemming from the displacement of General Motors — Chambers described GM as a great company, customer, and partner as well as "an icon." Dow chief Robert Thompson proclaimed Cisco a "fitting addition," saying the company's offerings "are vital to an economy and culture still adapting to the Information Age - just as automobiles were essential to America in the 20th Century."

Cisco is one of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel, and just over a year ago announced the opening of the company's Integrated Services Routers to third-party development via Linux-based modules. The company also sponsored a $100,000 competition for ISR developers, which just completed its first phase with the announcement of ten finalists who will now move on to application development, submitting their final products before August 15.

We certainly look forward to seeing the new Cisco servers in action in a Tokyo datacenter sometime soon, and also seeing Cisco add more value to the open source world.

You can read the original article on the Linux Journal website here: Cisco To Join The Dow -- And Will Take Linux With It.

Polycom is another company that is doing well despite the recent economic crisis. Polycom is the leading teleconferencing and videoconferencing specialist, and has seen sales rise by 15.5%. Of course with many companies looking to cut costs, video conferencing and teleconferencing solutions make a lot of sense - the initial capital expenditure is quickly recapped through ongoing travel cost savings. Swine flu is another area that has driven sales of Polycom equipment in the last quarter.

Polycom sees silver lining in downturn

By Winston Chai

The global recession and swine flu have dampened the outlook for most businesses, but for conferencing equipment maker Polycom, they have turned out to be a double boon.

Although the US-led financial crisis weighed down most economies in the second half of 2008, Polycom's full-year sales still rose 15.5 per cent to US$1.1 billion. Its regional revenue surged even more as businesses and governments splashed out on new video-conferencing systems to boost collaboration and cut operating costs.

'We grew around 20 per cent in the Asia-Pacific in 2008,' says the managing director of Polycom's Asia-Pacific operations Hansjoerg Wagner.

'We also expanded our regional headcount significantly last year. We increased our employee base about 25 per cent on the ground.'

The company now employs more than 2,500 workers worldwide, including about 70 at its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore.

According to Mr Wagner, governments and businesses in the region have shown a strong propensity to use video-conferencing in the past few years - and recent events have accelerated the adoption curve.

Polycom, which used to specialize in audio-conferencing equipment for corporate meeting rooms, now derives close to 70 per cent of its sales from video-conferencing systems. The Asia-Pacific currently contributes almost 25 per cent to the company's global video solutions revenue.

Click on the following link to read the rest of the article: Polycom sees silver lining in downturn.

For companies based in Tokyo and Japan, Polycom have a great range of solutions for companies of all sizes - from SOHO all the way up to the enterprise. Denphone is a certified Polycom reseller, and can help your company implement a Polycom solution. Contact us today for a no obligation quote.

Highway Linux

We were pleased to receive a copy of Highway Linux at Mays' VoIP Lounge. This is a new Linux distribution which was built in only 3 days. It is based on the Japanese version of the Puppy Linux distribution and features the use of the GD-HighwayGothicJA-OTF font (more information about the font can be found here: http://www.hogera.com/pcb/font/. This distribution is fast to load and ran fine on an old test box we use here, although it did have problems with my dual monitor set up that required some configuration of xorg.conf.

The font looks nice, and is easy to read. Japanese fonts are one area that has needed work from the linux community for a long while now, and it is good to see thing moving forward in that area.

As far as we are aware, this distribution is not available for download, although we have a copy at the Denphone office if anyone is interested in having a go on this distribution.

Denphone News

Denphone completes preliminary testing of Mitel 5224 Handset

Denphone is pleased to announce that they have successfully completed preliminary testing of the Mitel 5224 VoIP SIP enabled office telephone handset and that the Mitel handset and SIP firmware is compliant with the Denphone range of PBX systems.

Functions tested and found to be working:

• Outbound calls
• Inbound calls
• Blind transfers
• Announced call transfer
• Transfer to mobile phone
• Conferencing
• Conference split (private conference in a conference9
• Voicemail
• Message waiting indicator (MWI)
• Speakerphone
• Call Display
• Hold
• Park
• Cascade
• Call pick-up (Transfer to group)
• Hunt group
• Function key programming
• Headset
• Missed call display

Functions tested and not working:

• Japanese display

Japanese display is not available with the Mitel 5224 IP phones. Languages supported include English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch.

The sound quality during testing was good - not up to the level of the HD Polycom units, but certainly clear and undistorted. The screen size is quite small, so although it displays missed calls, it is difficult to navigate through those calls compared to phones with a larger LCD display such as the Polycom 601. Using some functions, such as hold, were not as user friendly as possible. For example pressing the button to place someone on hold again causes the call to be dropped rather than picked up; one needs to press a line key button for the call to be moved off hold. The handset was comfortable to use, and easy to pick up.

Denphone is not planning to sell Mitel handsets at this time, preferring to focus on Polycom and Cisco equipment, but we do support Mitel equipment in Japan.

VoIP & Asterisk Lounge June 11th, 2009

The next VoIP & Asterisk Lounge will be held Thursday, June 11th, from 6pm at Cafe Lolita in Azabujuban, Tokyo. This monthly event is a great chance to meet and network with other Asterisk and VoIP users and developers in the Tokyo region.

• Cost: Free Entrance (drinks are between 500 and 900yen, some food is available, but it is non-vegetarian).
• Directions: From Azabujuban Station Exit 7 (Oedo or Namboku Lines),turn right and walk 2 minutes towards Roppongi Hills.
• Alternatively, exit at Roppongi station and walk down the hill towards Azabujuban (10 minute walk). Turn left when you get to Tsutaya. Cafe Lolita is on your left.

We look forward to seeing you there!

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About Denphone

Denphone K.K. is Japan's leading provider of open PC based VOIP Telephone PBX systems. Denphone supplies Digium / Asterisk solutions, Cisco, Polycom, Nortel, snom and Grandstream phone and video systems as well as our own bespoke solutions.

Contact Denphone

Denphone is centrally located in Tokyo's Minato Ward in Azabujuban. We can be contacted by telephone on 03-4550-1405, via this contact page or by reply to the address this magazine was sent from.

Our postal address is: #402 Azabu Nagasaka Bd, 1-4-8 Azabujuban, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0045 Japan.