Demos that show off technology solutions aren’t just pictures or words though. They’re carefully crafted to show and tell. Our recent project created for Intel for use at HIMSS 2018 is a prime example of showing and telling—of blending technology and marketing.
HIMMS is one of the leading conferences on health information and technology. This year, Intel showcased a solution that it developed alongside some of its ecosystem partners to transform healthcare right at the patient’s bedside (or “the edge”). My colleague, Joe Staples, wrote about some of the challenges of healthcare at the edge and some of the solutions that are evolving to meet those challenges in his blog post, “Edge Computing in Healthcare,” last month.
To showcase its solution, Intel used a demo that combined Intel processors, Dell EMC servers, and the Wind River Titanium Control virtualization platform to create a powerful architecture for running healthcare edge applications with:
- Real-time responsiveness
- Agility and scalability
- Mission-critical reliability
Figure 1: The high-level overview of the platform Intel showcased at HIMSS 2018 and that can run healthcare edge applications in ways never imaged
Those benefits are delivered right at the patient’s bedside, which is what makes the platform so valuable. The demo highlighted two solutions for aggregating data from multiple bedside monitors—from different vendors and with different embedded technologies—to a single dashboard where clinicians can view data from different patients at a single glance. One of the solutions used Intel Computer Vision Technology and IP cameras to digitize data scraped from monitors and send it back to the dashboard—turning disconnected devices into connected ones simply by pointing cameras at bedside monitors.
Preparing a Demo (and Seeing It Safely to Post-Op)
Demos start with a solution or technology that a client wants to showcase. Sometimes, the clients knows the story they want to tell; other times, they know the technology, and they want help identifying a good use case to showcase the technology’s capabilities. Prowess has helped clients with both approaches. In the case of Intel’s HIMMS demo, Intel knew which use cases would highlight the platform that Intel and its partners had developed, and Prowess got right to work standing up the environment and creating the demo.
With the basic idea of what to showcase, we outlined a scope of the overall demo. That scope included outlining the specific workflow and beginning to determine how the actual demo (whether live, as recorded video, or both), the talking points and on-screen messaging, and any design elements would all work together to create a whole.
Simultaneously, Prowess engineers were standing up the necessary equipment, deploying and managing apps, and diving in to create all the needed details, such as user accounts, databases, and so on. Writers and designers were digging in to the mindset of the audience, messaging, and technical details in order to tell a comprehensive story. And the project manager was keeping it all running smoothly.
Prowess engineers, writers, designers, and project managers collaborated closely with each other and with the client to nurse the demo through iterative milestones to a successful conclusion. This level of collaboration allowed Prowess to rapidly produce a demo that hit the mark not only with the client, but—most importantly—with the client’s prospective customers. We created the HIMMS demo in virtually record time—from start to finish, it took less than a full calendar month to produce the four-minute demo.
A Taste of Our Own Medicine
Prowess hasn’t just created demos, we’ve engineered a demo solution. Our tool uses an internally developed framework that integrates engineering functions, actions, and tasks and synchronizes supporting messaging and illustrations. The process enables a demo to run repeatedly and seamlessly without the need for the presenter to click the mouse and navigate a system—the framework makes it automatic. This way, the presenter can talk and interact with the prospect and not the computer.
If Your Needs Include a Demo, Contact Prowess
If you’re looking for your own demo—whether for a trade show, for online usage, or for your sales team to present to prospects—contact Prowess Consulting to see how we can help. Until then, keep up with our take on emerging trends and technologies by following Prowess on our blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.