TAAConnect is a provider of telecommunications and IT services to businesses of all sizes in Australia and New Zealand. TAA Connect started in 1992, has thirty employees and a select range of sub-contractors. Head office is at Bowen Hills in Brisbane.
How would you describe your business?
Today, everything can be connected to make business more efficient and effective. TAAconnect supplies telephony, IT, audio and video-conferencing, networking, software solutions, point of sale solutions, messaging, wireless, Next G mobile and broadband solutions of all kinds – tailored to each customer’s unique needs. Every solution starts with understanding the business.
IT managers now have strategies to incorporate mobility tools such as Blackberries, iPhones, iPads and similar devices into their businesses. What has changed is that so many new applications are useful.
The benefits of convergence can be as simple as integration between Outlook and phone, automated web conferencing and calendar, job tracking and quality auditing, or video-conferencing for training and management operations meetings.
What changes are taking place in your business category?
Customers want more of a value proposition than ever before. The days of customers being interested in “bells and whistles” have disappeared. Clients want to know what the technology will do for them.
The days of proprietary products have gone. One person downloads a free device or piece of software and everybody wants it. The pressure for innovation in an organisation can come from anywhere, not just from the IT department, and the IT department has to deal with how to make it work.
The power of converged voice and data in devices is game changing. Something as simple as mobile twinning in an IP Telephony system means that any call to a phone number is
automatically routed to their mobile phone after a short predetermined number of rings. So staff can be accessed anywhere, at any time.
Unified Communications is about the integration of the PC and the phone. The user doesn’t have to think about it. If they have to think, they won’t use it. It has to be automatic.
So Presence means the ability to see at a glance who is on the phone and who is off the phone.
What used to be something that only the receptionist could do is now a function on everybody’s phone screen. It just about eliminates phone tag – calling, leaving messages and so on.
People can take calls in a car, without removing their hands from the steering wheel. Emails can be read aloud by the system, and you can make calls by speaking a client name aloud, with the system recognising and making the call. It’s very powerful.
Conferencing and collaboration functions are being used a lot more because the tools have become more user-friendly and easy to use. So it is a straightforward exercise to conference from one phone to one phone, one phone to many. It is easy to broadcast the sessions to anywhere and anyone. When you can add to that capability the option of document sharing on screen as well, videoconferencing becomes an ideal management collaboration tool.
A lot of this technology wasn’t mature in 2007, but it is today. And because of the Global Financial Crisis, everybody is now seriously looking at how to cut costs. So there has been a lot of
reviewing of business practices and a push to use smartphones, softphones, videoconferencing, iPads and other clones.
A lot of our clients are now moving away from proprietary suppliers to open system and
virtualised servers and software. The market has picked up and clients are now looking around for new and better ways to improve their productivity and performance,
Mobility
Mobility is about enabling workers to operate effectively from anywhere – office, “hot desk”, home office, hotel, car, café or even sitting on a fence by the side of the road. To do this effectively, business devices of all kinds must be able to connect and talk to each other in real time, stably, securely and privately if desired.
Mobility “tools” are being used across the all industry sectors to a greater or lesser degree.
Device selection and use is dictated by the needs of individuals and by the demands of the work role within an organisation. Individuals will often own a number of devices and use whichever device they need.
Mobility extends beyond the people in an organisation to the assets the organisation owns.
Vehicles, plant and equipment can all be monitored, tracked and managed, improving productivity, efficiency and reducing costs.
GPS provides the location reference system that makes sense of the information coming from sensors and monitors on mobile devices and equipment.
Google Maps provides maps and images of regions, roads, buildings and locations connected to a host of useful directory products and services. Communications can be integrated, automated and made more efficient through unifying communications across devices, integrating voice and data and allowing access to content across the organisation.
Mobility needs software developed to support a mobile workforce and software to support mobile devices used on the road.
There are a few issues in this. Mobile workers need the right applications. They need to be able to access the applications securely. They need to be able to access the applications reliably. So the more an organisation relies on mobile devices and mobile applications, the more that
organisation has to ensure reliable storage, security, backup and disaster recovery.
Applications for work processes and mobile devices can be developed quickly and customised to suit the specific needs of an organisation. Mobile devices also need to be managed properly to ensure that individual needs are matched with the overall needs and requirements of an organisation.
These issues can be managed successfully and the benefits far outweigh any problems.
The following case studies illustrate these issues and solutions.