PARIS, June 16, 2005 - Cisco Systems® announced today that its Connected Real Estate IP framework has been used to form the foundation of network services at Les Fontaines, a 300-room business events facility close to Paris which is also the site of Capgemini University, the international training center for the global IT services and consulting group.
Les Fontaines is 25 minutes away from Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport and offers leadership seminars, training and development programs for the Capgemini Group. In addition, it brings hospitality services, meetings, conventions and team-building events to global organizations. Its estate includes three 100-seat amphitheatres, 42 'breakout' rooms, a 500-seat auditorium, reading area, library, café, bar and lounge, six dining rooms, game and billiards room, outdoor terrace, VIP suites, fitness center with swimming pool, sauna and Turkish bath, and 300-space car park.
The business-oriented nature of its customers and events means that an advanced multi-service technology infrastructure is seen as critical in streamlining operations on-site, for example by allowing details of meetings to be posted up on meeting room plasma screens from a central point instead of requiring a visit to each room. It also helps to ensure the marketability and profitability of the center.
"We charge a fixed rate per person, per day, which includes all services, such as food, drink, phone calls and Internet access," said Jacques Collin, president of Les Fontaines. "Our converged IP network helps us provide the kinds of network services our customers would expect, from wireless Internet access to global videoconferencing. It also helps to contain our infrastructure costs to allow us to offer this price proposition, which is very attractive to our customers and has already enabled us to start operating profitably since we opened for business. Cisco Systems was the only technology supplier that could offer us a completely IP-based technology and that understood our requirement for a flexible, state-of-the-art infrastructure."
Other applications and technologies that are featured at the center include broadcast TV over IP, multimedia PCs, interactive digital screens and videoconferencing terminals, all implemented and managed by Capgemini Integration Services.
Les Fontaines' network foundation is effectively a Cisco Connected Real Estate solution (Hotels, Meeting centers, Headquarters), a framework based on the Intelligent Information Network vision which in its first phase will focus on the convergence of voice, data and video. This infrastructure has been integrated with a suite of voice-over-IP applications from Cisco and third-party developers to offer high-speed Ethernet connections to the Internet as well as other services such as TV over IP, which relies on the performance and quality-of-service features of Cisco networks to enable hospitality venues to deliver television to guest rooms over their data network, doing away with the need for separate coaxial cabling. Les Fontaines is also using Cisco wireless infrastructure, Cisco Catalyst® 4500 Series switches, Cisco 7900 Series IP phones, Cisco CallManager call processing software and Cisco 200 Series voice gateways to analogue phones in guest rooms.
"The Cisco Connected Real Estate solution meets the requirements for state-of-the-art, reliable, flexible IP communications at Les Fontaines," commented Andrew Thomson, Business Development Manager, Cisco Systems. "This is an establishment that prides itself in coaching tomorrow's thought leaders in business, so it is absolutely vital that it should provide telecommunications technologies that match and even exceed those of the most advanced corporations on earth. With Cisco, the center can not only do that, but do it cost-effectively, too."
