Advances can help businesses improve service, save money
The Columbian
Published: January 21, 2015, 4:00pm
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The interior of the Integra offices at its new corporate headquarters in east Vancouver. The telecom company last year moved its headquarters and hundreds of employees into the former Hewlett-Packard complex.
As the New Year begins to come into view, it’s the right time to review your business strategy to ensure you’re aligned with achieving your goals.
Our focus on those strategies, as business leaders, should begin with those areas that are strong prospects and/or those that attempt to mitigate the items that might be challenges in the year ahead. For many of us, those areas could be one and the same, depending on how prepared we are and how well the business is structured to execute on the prospect or challenge.
There are major prospects at the door of every enterprise in the form of technology, and that technology reveals itself in the form of new applications such as SaaS, Big Data, and Business Intelligence, just to name a few. These applications and many others, at one point or another (to include those applications that are still being imagined), will allow the enterprise networks of today to be as feature rich and nimble as your smartphone.
A majority of these applications will be optimally served through a cloud environment. By taking advantage of this environment the enterprise will be able to reduce the need for large step-function capital while gaining efficiency through the use of technology in the business. By moving toward a licensing model that will likely be based on usage, the enterprise will be able to flatten out its spending over time, enabling reinvestment into core business functions that will drive continued growth.
Another advantage of this cloud environment is the ability to more effectively implement a much-needed and required disaster recovery solution. Disaster recovery is often an area that many enterprises place on the back burner due to the priorities of the day-to-day. Enterprises that are focused on disaster recovery are often shocked by the investment required.
With the ability to “spin up and spin down” applications in a more cost-effective and time-saving manner, service providers will become more agile in their approach enabling technology to be pushed to the end user faster. The access to these applications will enable a business to strengthen its existing processes, leverage efficiencies and gain a competitive advantage by shortening the development life cycle.
These shifts occurring in the technology sector will ultimately affect how users interact with the network. The network is becoming smarter and enabling the enterprise access to these required applications anywhere with the ubiquitous quality that is required.
Jason Koenders is senior vice president of the Integra telecom firm.
