31 March 2014
Jasco
Electronics Holdings (The Jasco Group), through its Converged Solutions
Division, has refreshed its entire IT infrastructure in a move to consolidate
its IT communications and harness the latest technology to better serve its
customers.
Says Paul
McKibbin, MD of Jasco Networks, “We started off with a complete audit of the
Group's IT infrastructure which allowed us to identify where the pain points
were and what their current strengths and weaknesses are.”
“We soon
realised that there were a lot of disparate systems in different divisions and
branches, mostly legacy systems which were acquired through acquisitions and
mergers. This made the infrastructure difficult to administrate and maintain.
Additionally, with users using so many different devices to access the
corporate network, we also identified certain security risks at various
end-points of the infrastructure.”
He says
knowing that IT is an enabler for business to provide a better service to its
customers, the group realised Converged Solutions provide the business with an
edge over its competitors, adding that as businesses move to a more cloud-based
environment, the demand for bandwidth dramatically increases, which needs to be
carefully managed.
After
presenting its findings and recommendations to the board, the Division got the
go-ahead to implement a robust communications infrastructure that allows for
fast, secure access via Fibre connectivity and wireless LAN to hosted email and
the Internet, as well as Voice over IP (VoIP) at its head office.
“From a Jasco
Converged Solutions perspective, the Jasco Group is a typical customer that we
serve as their strategy, like ours, is to move to a more managed services and
applications in a data environment,” he adds.
Jasco
Converged Solutions assisted the Group to simplify and reduce the costs of its inter-branch
communications with one invoice from one service provider. With this converged
communication environment, the number of disparate services have been reduced
and consolidated under one technology umbrella, managed by Jasco Converged
Solutions. This not only simplified the communications environment but also
drastically reduced costs as well.
Since the
implementation of the VoIP platform at Jasco head office in April 2013, the
group has realised savings of 31% on previous costs over a six month period
from April to September. Communications represent a significant cost centre for
the business. The savings realised from the new solution will continue to pay
off over the long-term.
“This
was a great opportunity for us to demonstrate our capabilities to the Group,
and by providing the services in-house, it also provided a case study for us to
showcase to our current and potential customers. Overall, we have reduced the
group’s technology complexity. The network is now easier to manage and troubleshoot
if there are problems. Furthermore, there is one point of accountability and a
better level of support via a single support centre,” he concludes.