An Inside Look at In-House Multimedia

Multimedia, the computerized integration of video, text, audio, and graphics, covers the industry spectrum, from CD-ROM games through to sophisticated business presentations. In-between lie such uses as education, training, electronic books, video on d emand, and streamlined access the information superhighway. Multimedia is the wave of the future, a revolution at our doorsteps -- at least, that's what the hype and industry headlines generated by computer manufacturers would have us believe.

Yet, when you ask the same manufacturers how they are making use of multimedia, the answer, in many cases, appears to be: Not with a great deal of confidence. Indeed, after four major computer and electronics makers begged off being interviewed for thi s story because, "We're really just getting started with that," it became something of an Abrahamic quest to find even two honest companies willing -- or able -- to strut their stuff.

Intel Japan

The first company to respond positively to my request was Intel Japan KK. Its Silicon Valley-based parent, Intel Corporation, is the world's number one semiconductor manufacturer, generating much of its $8.8 billion in revenues from the x86 and Pentium processors that run more than 80 percent of the world's PCs.

But Intel is also carving out a stake for itself in video communications. It recently introduced Proshare, a family of PC-based personal conferencing products. And then there is Indeo, Intel's video compression software that will run video clips on Win dows based PCs. Indeo can be downloaded free from major information services like Nifty Serve and CompuServe. Indeo has recently been playing an important role in-house at Intel, helping to get the company's messages and specialized information out to the industry. By making this information available in a timely, dynamic fashion, Intel hopes to stay ahead of t he growing clone competition and maintain its wide lead as top microprocessor vendor. To this end, the company has even taken the step of creating a new corporate position for the bearers of its messages: architecture managers, or AMs. Intel currently has about 70 AMs, including six in Japan. Masafumi Hozumi, an AM program manager at Intel Japan, described to me the role of this group. "Our job is to lay out our future plans, strategies, and direction to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers)." In other words, the task is to sell "Intel Ins ide" as the basic architecture for PCs. In the past, AMs had to rely on a huge database of files, press releases, and other information that Intel Corporation had built up over the years. "But it was difficult to find the information, and capacity became limited as more products were introduc ed," notes Hozumi.

Then, early this year, multimedia came to the rescue. Now, instead of relying on paper and overhead transparencies for his presentations, Hozumi carries out his mission armed primarily with a notebook computer and a portable CD-ROM drive. Each month, t he parent company sends him a new CD-ROM disk packed with Intel data, and for a cost of less than $10 per disk.

To demonstrate for me, Hozumi inserted a disk into his CD-ROM drive and called up various data and video clips, including Intel's latest Pentium TV commercials and even a CNN news spot that has a bearing on the computer industry. These are all stored o n the disk in compressed form with Indeo, and they can be played back at 15 frames per second with the latest 3.2 version of the software.

Hozumi uses various applications, such as Lotus Development Corporation's 1-2-3 and AmiPro and Microsoft's PowerPoint 5.0, to convert segments from CD-ROM discs into customized presentations. He then saves these as files on the hard disk. Nevertheless, Hozumi also continues to make overhead transparencies for back-up in case things should go wrong.

One obvious drawback with the system is that everything is in English. Of course, Hozumi is there to translate whenever necessary, and he's also experimenting with Win/V (a shareware product that adds Japanese capability to English Windows 3.1) to loca lize his presentations.

Eventually, Intel wants to eliminate CD-ROM and instead provide video-on demand. This will have to wait, though, until high-speed communications lines become available to make it cost-effective. In the US, the company has already taken a step in that d irection. A number of Intel staff in Oregon are now regularly using Intel's multimedia personal conferencing package, Proshare, which utilizes ISDN (integrated systems digital network) lines for various exchanges of data and video conferencing. The group's general manager, according to Hozumi, has been able to reduce his twice-weekly visits to Intel's Santa Clara headquarters to twice a month, through the use of video conferencing and other features of Proshare.

Intel Japan is working to set up a Proshare system here to communicate directly with Intel in the US. But because the two countries use different data transfer methods in their ISDN systems, Intel Japan must first adapt its in-house PBX system to work with the US ISDN interface.

Intel is also using CD-ROM publishing to replace at least some of its paper-based technical documents and manuals, which run into tons when accumulated. Obvious benefits include reduced publishing costs and a significant reduction in the mountains of p aper. "Before, we each had a stack of [technical] data sheets one meter high," says Hozumi.

CD-ROM-based manuals also have the advantage of being updated monthly, versus annual updates with paper. Nevertheless, some customers and Intel engineers still request paper copies. Despite such end-user advantages as fast key-word searches with CD-ROM , when it comes to locating numeral-based data, engineers often find that relying on their own memory is a lot faster. Hozumi admits, though, that at least engineers are now sharing the paper documents rather than requesting individual sets.

NEC Field Service

The ether brave respondent who agreed to be interviewed regarding its in-house use of multimedia was NEC Field Service, Ltd., a wholly-owned NEC subsidiary that provides installation, maintenance, and related technical services to NEC's corporate custo mers.

The company has established a Technical Assistance Division (TAD) in Fuchu, on the outskirts of Tokyo, that is equipped to provide a high degree of trouble-shooting support to the company's five regional centers, which in turn support numerous field of fices. Until recently, an engineer, upon encountering complex problems requiring TAD support, would typically relay the symptoms to TAD by phone, then follow up with more detailed information by fax.

Such communications methods proved to be cumbersome and slow. Currently, NEC Field Service is in the process of shifting over to an in-house multimedia-based communications technology called the MAID (Multimedia technical Assistance and Decision) Syste m. This UNIX-based system runs on NEC's EWS4800 workstations, powered by the MIPS R4000 chip capable of delivering 78 MIPS (millions of instructions per second). Communication is performed via ISDN-64 lines.

MAID allows engineers to simultaneously share and process multimedia information, including graphics, handwritten notes, and live video at 15 frames per second. At the same time, the engineers can talk to each other and share the same screens.

Kunio Inoe, a field engineer at NEC Field Service's headquarters in Minato-ku, Tokyo demonstrated how the system worked. He set up an ISDN communications link with Shigeo Yamaguchi, a TAD support engineer in Fuchu. A microphone and camera were attached to his workstation to provide real-time voice and video. Inoe also had a scanner and a vertically mounted fine-resolution camera connected as peripherals to the basic system.

First, Inoe sent Yamaguchi a computerized copy of an error report via the scanner. Yamaguchi could use this information to check the NEC ACOS mainframe-based database running Oracle to see if a similar problem has been reported in the past. The two eng ineers can also shared hand-written data via whiteboards.

After reading the error report, Yamaguchi requested copies of a thermal photograph of the problem area and a thermal graph read-out, which Inoe had already prepared. An image of the color photo was sent directly via the mounted camera, and the graph wa s transmitted via the scanner. With all this information available almost instantaneously, Yamaguchi was able to consult the database and quickly track down the problem.

According to Inoe, the MAID system is easy to learn, and it took only one hour for him to become a competent user. While it is difficult to estimate solid data on the savings in time, Inoe estimates that the amount of time spent analyzing a problem wit h TAD has been reduced by two-thirds compared with doing it the old way by phone and fax.

Koji Enomoto, general manager of NEC Field Service's corporate planning -- the group responsible for implementing the system -- says they only began installing the systems this April. "We have installed 10 systems so far, but plan to have 52 up and run ning by the end of the year," said Enomoto. "And there should be 110 in operation by next year."

Only three support engineers at the Fuchu TAD, out of a total staff of some 65 engineers and managers, are so far equipped with a MAID system. Likewise, field engineers in branch offices are currently required to travel to their regional offices in ord er to access a MAID system.

One obstacle to faster implementation is the cost. The system that Inoe used to give his demonstration including workstation, whiteboard, software, video and audio codecs (the compression and decompression technology needed to convert analog video and speech to digital data, and vice versa), as well as the scanner and camera -- cost in the region of 3.6 million.

MAID is an adaptation of a commercial system called OfficeMermaid, which features the sharing of application software for groupware situations, and which NEC Corp. began marketing last year. OfficeMermaid comes in two versions: one for ISDN, priced fro m 2.45 million, and a version for Local Area Network operations that communicates over the normal phone line, priced from 2.18 million. NEC is also planning to launch a server version sometime later this year.

Currently, MAID is being used exclusively for trouble shooting. Enomoto says, however, that they are working to expand its application into maintenance for on-site NEC Field Service engineers.