Attendees at IM/H&RS were treated to demonstrations of the newest trends in building automation and IP convergence.
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CCRE Demonstration
Using Cisco IP Phones as a platform, Nevotek allowed booth visitors to use the phone’s touch screen to perform environmental management in a simulated hotel room. They were able to control room lighting, draw curtains, and set the temperature—all over the IP network.
These functions, if automated, are typically managed through a separate panel somewhere on a wall or a surface of a hotel room. A key benefit of offering these controls through the interface of the guest room phone is the elimination of extraneous equipment (that is, one less control panel)—less hardware to manage, and less clutter in the room. Another benefit is the ease of guestroom management that these applications offer both the hotel guest and the business or hotel administrator. Nevotek’s CCRE applications help hotel managers improve each guest’s experience by empowering the guest to manage the room itself through the IP phone screen. A second aspect of this benefit is the opportunity for centralized management through the building or hotel administration. For instance, a hotel might use this application to close all the curtains on the west side of the building at sunset—remotely.
Guestroom 2010
Elsewhere in the International Hotel/Motel & Restaurant Show, several Nevotek applications played active roles in Guestroom 2010, a prototype hotel room featuring the latest and near-future technologies. One upcoming technology of note for IP telephony in the hotel room space is IPTV. According to Nevotek’s vision, “All of the advanced features that were presented at IH/M&RS—both in the CCRE environment of the Nevotek booth and the Guestroom 2010 IP telephony applications—will be future-looking for integration into the IPTV environments that are now emerging in many vertical markets.” (IPTV is a system where a digital television service is delivered over an IP infrastructure.) |
