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Category: Culture

  • Access your mobile phone with your performance eyewear

    Liberty Sports partners with Avaya
    Liberty Sports partners with Avaya

    Liberty Sport Shoots for the Moon with Avaya Midmarket Solutions

    SANTA CLARA, CA–(Marketwired – May 02, 2017) – As Liberty Sport grew into a dominant force in the performance eyewear industry and a choice for NASA missions, the company needed a new approach to communications and customer service to mirror the high quality of its products. Called to join the mission, Avaya Midmarket Solutions provided the functionality, mobility and remote accessibility that enables Liberty Sport to execute powerful launches with sustained contact at a level the company had not experienced before.

    Significant growth brought Liberty Sport to a crossroads. It had to decide whether to support increasing demand by upgrading its existing solution from an Avaya competitor, or to consider solutions from other vendors. The company elected to change course once Avaya Midmarket Solutions came into the picture with unified communications and contact center support. Avaya offered functionality and efficiency that made an upgrade of their existing solution pale in comparison. Ultimately, the new Avaya solutions enabled Liberty Sport to:

    • Integrate with existing systems so agents are better informed when working with customers.
    • Increase scalability to handle more customers with better service quality.
    • Enhance mobility for traveling executives and managers, allowing them to use their smartphones to seamlessly access calls and messages sent to their company extension.
    • Provide better remote access for and oversight of work-at-home agents. When a major snowstorm caused some to lose power at their homes, agents were able to continue working from any location where they could get Internet access through a wifi connection.
    • Generate real-time and historic reports that enable better staffing strategies and performance improvements among the agent workforce. Management can view peak call times and adjust staffing as needed, which has already resulted in different shift hours. This will also lead to more revenue as agents are placed in roles where they can generate sales.
    • Significantly improved voice quality throughout the organization.

    Liberty Sport Vice President Robin Young said:

    “When I saw how much reporting functionality Avaya would give us, that’s what made me go this route. What Avaya offered was still more than what the upgraded system would give us. Avaya is always staying above the cusp, always striving to improve their products.”

    Learn more about Liberty Sport and the company’s implementation of Avaya Midmarket Solutions in the case study.

    About Liberty Sport

    For nearly a century, Liberty Sport has been producing superior frames and lenses to handle the rigors of sport. Built to perform under demanding conditions, our products set the global standard for sports eyewear and Rx. From leading ASTM F803 impact sports protective to innovative sun technology, our commitment to research and innovation is unrivaled. And you’ll see that commitment in every product we make.

    About Avaya

    Avaya enables the mission critical, real-time communication applications of the world’s most important operations. As the global leader in delivering superior communications experiences, Avaya provides the most complete portfolio of software and services for contact center and unified communications with integrated, secure networking- offered on premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid. Today’s digital world requires some form of communications enablement, and no other company is better positioned to do this than Avaya. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.

  • Artist Highlight: Gerhard Richter

    Gerhard Richter at 85
    Gerhard Richter at 85

    Yet today you would follow these interpretations of the meaning of your work with interest, and say that the motifs were chosen arbitrarily? Everything has a reason, including the selection of the photos, which was not arbitrary but appropriate to the period, its highs and lows and my sense of them.On Pop, East and West, and Some of the Picture Sources.

    Uwe M. Schneede in  Conversation with Gerhard Richter

    Gerhard Richter was born to Horst and Hildegard Richter in Dresden on February 9, 1932. Gerhard was their first child, with a daughter, Gisela, arriving in 1936.  Horst was a teacher and Hildegard was a bookseller and a talented pianist. They were a well-read middle-class family.

    In 1946, Gerhard Richter’s father was released from the Americans who had captured him as a POW. He returned to his family, who had relocated from Reichenau to the even smaller Waltersdorf, a village on the Czech border.  Horst’s reception was not as warm as he might have hoped. Commenting on this many years later, Gerhard explained: “He shared most fathers’ fate at the time… Nobody wanted them.” After working in a textile mill in nearby Zittau his father eventually found a post as an administrator of a distance learning program for an educational institution in Dresden.

    Gerhard Richter was a highly gifted child but notoriously bad in school who even brought home poor grades in drawing.  He attended  a vocational school, where he studied stenography, accounting and Russian. Fortunately, he was just a little too young to have been conscripted to the army himself during the last year of the war. His two uncles died in the war and Gerhard Richter’s aunt Marianne was starved to death in a psychiatric clinic due the eugenics policies of the Third Reich who did not tolerate anyone deemed to have “mental issues.”

    Gerhard remembered quite a lot of the war: “The retreating German soldiers, the convoys, the low-flying Russian planes shooting at refugees, the trenches, the weapons lying around everywhere, artillery, broken down cars. Then the invasions of the Russians […] the ransacking, rapes, a huge camp where us kids sometimes got barley soup.”14

    The end of World War II in many ways coincided with Gerhard’s transition from childhood to adolescence, and, now under Soviet control following the Potsdam Agreement, it was to be a very different Germany to the one he had been born into.

    In February 1950 he was taken on as an assistant set painter for the municipal theatre in Zittau for the sets for productions including Goethe’s Faust and Schiller’s William Tell among others. After a short time as a State Employee Gerhard Richter returned to his birth city of Dresden in the summer of 1951, ready to begin his formal studies to be a painter.

    He enjoyed his studies at the Academy but was disturbed by the ever increasing