Mark Lyn­der­say

Last Thurs­day, Dig­i­cel's busi­ness di­vi­sion launched a new Cloud So­lu­tions port­fo­lio of ser­vices for its busi­ness users.

The new col­lec­tion of of­fer­ings bun­dles ser­vices from Cit­rix, a bil­lion-dol­lar desk­top vir­tu­al­i­sa­tion and net­work soft­ware provider which has had a pres­ence in T&T for more than a decade, Mi­crosoft, which has made a ma­jor thrust in­to pro­vid­ing cloud so­lu­tions with its Azure plat­form, and Cis­co, a key net­work hard­ware sys­tems provider.

Dig­icelTT's CEO John Delves said the com­pa­ny has "a com­mit­ment to the best net­work pos­si­ble," and this new suite of prod­ucts aims to lever­age the band­width of its new 4G HSPA net­work, which the com­pa­ny launched in ear­ly 2012.

The project is still very much in its ear­li­est de­vel­op­ment stages, but, ac­cord­ing to David Cum­mings, Dig­i­cel's in­for­ma­tion com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) se­nior busi­ness de­vel­op­ment ex­ec­u­tive, cus­tomers will use a sin­gle icon on sup­port­ed de­vices to ac­cess the ser­vices they have signed up for.

To be clear, all of the ser­vices that Dig­i­cel is of­fer­ing here have ex­ist­ed pre­vi­ous­ly and could be con­tract­ed in­de­pen­dent­ly. Cloud-based so­lu­tions are now an ag­gres­sive mar­ket space and every ma­jor soft­ware and ser­vices provider is of­fer­ing tools that can be ac­cessed us­ing a Web brows­er.

The suc­cess of this Dig­i­cel brand­ed busi­ness ser­vice will de­pend on three fac­tors: ease of use, re­li­a­bil­i­ty and speed. If the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider can nail this crit­i­cal tri­umvi­rate, it will com­mand a key po­si­tion in the space.

Dig­i­cel tasked Matt Craw­ford and Cor­man Clif­ford with demon­strat­ing the ser­vices and the af­fa­ble pair did a good job of demon­strat­ing con­nec­tiv­i­ty be­tween mo­bile de­vices on mul­ti­ple plat­forms mak­ing a con­nec­tion to com­put­er sys­tems and ac­cess­ing their soft­ware.

"Mo­bil­i­ty is dom­i­nat­ing CEO mind­share," Craw­ford said in in­tro­duc­ing the new prod­uct.

To their cred­it, they took some mild­ly em­bar­rass­ing but en­tire­ly hon­est in­stances of datas­tream buffer­ing in their stride, cov­er­ing the dark screens des­per­ate­ly load­ing da­ta with cheer­ful pat­ter.

What was on show was pret­ty fa­mil­iar to any­one who has ever used a vir­tu­al net­work con­nec­tion (VNC) to per­form ac­tions on a re­mote screen. Dig­i­cel's Desk­top Man­age­ment tool will bring deep­er ca­pa­bil­i­ties for se­cur­ing da­ta on such net­works, man­ag­ing soft­ware ver­sions and will al­low com­pa­nies to ex­er­cise more con­trol over busi­ness da­ta that's ac­cessed us­ing the va­ri­ety of de­vices that users in­sist­ing on BY­OD (Bring Your Own De­vice) com­put­ing so­lu­tions to the ta­ble.

The new prod­uct, Matt Craw­ford in­sist­ed, of­fers "the free­dom that peo­ple want with the se­cu­ri­ty that IT de­mands."

At the core of any in­te­grat­ed cloud so­lu­tion is da­ta back­up and ac­cess, which Dig­i­cel will be pro­vid­ing out of five da­ta cen­tres that it's es­tab­lished in four coun­tries in the re­gion, Ja­maica, T&T (two), Pana­ma and Grena­da.

At launch, the com­pa­ny of­fered mail ser­vice us­ing Mi­crosoft Ex­change, mo­bile de­vice man­age­ment, the Mi­crosoft Of­fice on­line suite and cloud-based back­up. The com­pa­ny projects cost re­duc­tions of up to 51 per cent over tra­di­tion­al back-room so­lu­tions.

The sales pitch for the new prod­ucts sounds like both a dream for com­pa­nies and a night­mare for the peo­ple who will ac­tu­al­ly be ex­pect­ed to do all the work these sys­tems en­able.

Com­pa­nies can move their ex­pen­di­ture from a cap­i­tal ex­pense to a month­ly op­er­at­ing ex­pense, scal­ing up or down as de­mand changes. Ex­ec­u­tives can work any­where with ac­cess to their desk­top sys­tems from smart­phones and tablets, and the sup­port mod­el moves from a help desk to an on-de­mand, self-ser­vice sys­tem.

An­drew Hoey, Dig­i­cel's sales di­rec­tor, said his four years work­ing in the T&T mar­ket had giv­en him a "unique in­sight in­to the pinch points of lo­cal busi­ness."

"We are no longer just a mo­bile provider," he promised the room full of ICT pro­fes­sion­als at the Hilton last week. "We are now a full-ser­vice provider."

Dig­i­cel Busi­ness' Cloud Part­ners

Avaya

Cis­co We­bEx

HP

Or­a­cle

Mi­crosoft

ON­SSI

Check­point pureAd­van­tage

ITIL