Had lunch the other day with Richard Farnworth, the general manager of enterprise solutions at NEC. It's an unusual IT company in that despite a hundred year heritage in the industry and an incredibly strong track record of technical innovation, it still suffers from a perception problem among a lot of people – something of a well-kept secret. Part of this, explained Farnworth, is maybe because 90 percent of the stuff that the company makes is kept for the Japanese domestic market. But NEC has also been a victim of its own success in boldly moving 'beyond IT', as its mantra goes, and delivering holistic end-to-end solutions. In this way it's chosen as much for its delivery ethos as its products, so if a customer wants a different brand's technology as part of its solution, it shall be done.

That said, they're also working on some interesting stuff which could be pretty revolutionary for enterprises and governments around the world. One of these is smart CCTV technology which can monitor the movements of people and things and alert if there is any pre-defined unusual activity. This makes the whole process of monitoring more efficient and probably means less staff are needed to sit staring at their CCTV monitors, or twiddling their, um, thumbs, or whatever it is they do, I'm not going to speculate.

Another neat solution Farnworth told me about was invented to create more 'dwell time' for airport passengers, to encourage them to buy more duty-free. Working with the airport, the airline handling agents and other parties, NEC invented a solution to notify passengers how long it would take for their gate to appear on the departure boards, which could also be tailored to include texts when the gate is ready.

The firm's also heavily involved in biometrics, although it's an area like RFID which has so far failed to take off in the massive way that was predicted, argued Farnworth. One which is being trialed currently however is a solution which aims to segregate domestic and international airline passengers so boarding passes cannot be swapped in the departure lounge. The NEC answer is using biometric identifiers stamped onto the boarding card to uniquely tie one card to one passenger – something we're all likely to see in a few years time.