Tag Archive for 'Telecom'

Telecom rolling out some new SME stuff

Published by Ben Kepes on September 13, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand and SaaS. 3 Comments

While I was away Telecom announced a new host of options for SMEs. Basically it seems that Telecom have identified that SMEs in New Zealand are time-constrained and one of the things that gets overlooked in their busy-ness is a complete set of web presences.

To this end they’ve partnered with a bunch of providers around the world in an effort to bring affordable and easy solutions for SMEs.

Some of the stuff they’re doing includes;

  • Business specific broadband (higher caps and better support)
  • Business specific hardware (modems with more filtering options)
  • Web design and hosting (a simple one-stop-shop for domain name registration, site design and hosting

Fact is that most SMEs are Telecom customers, and most could benefit from some of these tools - the attractiveness of a single-bill ICT relationship is pretty compelling.

Yet to come, according to the Telecom press release, is backup, storage and business tool software offerings - all delivered via SaaS - nice!

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Voda joins the 20th century, and other carrier gossip

Published by Ben Kepes on August 7, 2008 in Business, IT and New Zealand. 4 Comments

It seems Vodafone New Zealand have rolled out their own forums. Thus far there are a few posts - mainly from Voda spin doctor (and really nice guy by the way) Paul Brislen.

We should be positive that Voda is creating a forum for discussion - I feel for Paul - I’m sure he evangelised the forum thing - now he gets dangled out to be eviscerated by the masses - it must be lonely being the primary voice in a forum - it’s kind of like a community… of one.

It would have been great to deploy it internally initially to get some content up, and time will tell how receptive Voda are to criticism. But I can’t help but think that once Geekzone takes it’s traffic, there’s not many potential customers for the Voda forum site. Maybe it would have been better for Voda to partner with Geekzone - let a neutral and independent voice run the community side of things?

On another note there are rumours that Telecom will be announcing some big network changes tomorrow - which, if correct, could balance the cards somewhat given the hype that Voda has enjoyed of late thanks to the iPhone. Miki, my CTO in waiting, has an analysis over here which, while way over my head, should mean lots to some people (or some to lots of people)

Interesting times…..

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Some new services for the general public (who will never see this post ‘cos they don’t read blogs)

Published by Ben Kepes on July 25, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, New Zealand and Strategy. 7 Comments

This is one of those posts that many will respond to saying "oh but Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Symantec/AVG/Lavasoft has been doing that forever and for free - what’s so new about that?" Which is sort of a valid point and sort of not.

I live in two worlds - I’m an early adopter who uses bleeding-edge solutions, but I also work within organisations where Wiki has no other meaning than being the Maori word for "week", where blogs are nothing other than the surname of a fellow called Joe and where IMAP just means your fingers were cold when trying to type the word "map".

Yup - the fact of the matter is that Joe Public wants and arguably needs nicely managed, packaged and explained vanilla solutions.

Anyway - a couple of new products from Telecom piqued my interest.

Telecom Business Mail is MS Exchange and Outlook for the masses. It allows for mail, appointments and tasks to be accessed wherever and whenever. It leverages MS Outlook and subscription pricing (which, let’s face it, the majority of the population is comfortable with), has anti-spam/virus, handles the security side of things and comes with tech support which, tragic though it may sound, the majority of users still want. It costs users $10/month and is charged directly to their existing account.

Telecom Computer Care which is soon to be released is another one of those things that the digerati wished there was no need for but unfortunately there is*. Basically it’s virtual service tech combined with virtual sysadmin. Telecom deploys some fancy management software that, in the background, performs routine diagnostics and maintenance. It also has built in alerts and reports to let customers know of existing or rising issues. Once again the idea is nothing new - there are a multitude of (often free) applications which can do the same thing - but Joe Public doesn’t use them and is frightened by them.

All this stuff is pretty heartening for a SaaS junky. It shows that telcos can deploy SaaS solutions (other than their SaaS-like phone lines) ad bring them to the masses.

There’s also some really cool SME type stuff that I’ve heard we’ll see come out from the NZ Herald and Telecom in the next week or so - it’ll be interesting to look out for that.

* example - this morning one of my colleagues came to me with a networking issue. He was having trouble accessing some files on a remote machine. I asked him whether the remote machine was actually turned on - you can guess the answer :-)

And now the all important disclosure part. Diversity Limited has in the past consulted to Telecom - not specifically about the things mentioned above but about more general issues. That consulting relationship has now finished. Telecom is going to be a headline sponsor of a new initiative being set up by Ben, but this is entirely independent and neutral and any comments I make about Telecom are genuine and honest - ’nuff said!

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