21st Century Business

Building Blocks to the 21st Century Business

The 21st Century Business is built on connectivity; connecting people to each other, to customers, to suppliers, to their managers, to their staff, in the office, on the road, at home, and abroad. It is this connectivity that enables the 21st Century Business to react quickly to customer needs, deliver exceptional service, and add value to win in a competitive business environment.

Broadband

The first foundation block is the Internet. BT’s £10billion investment in the 21st Century Network brings faster connections to businesses and homes across the UK. Boffins will connect you into this network with fast ADSL2+ Broadband for voice and data speeds up to 24Mbit/sec with the necessary networking equipment to deliver performance and security to your 21st Century Business.

Routers

The second foundation block is the LAN and WAN network infrastructure. In your main office and major remote sites secure firewalls and layer II switches that support Quality of Service protocols provide optimum performance with security for your networks and servers whilst allowing packet prioritisation for high voice quality alongside data traffic.

Virtual Private Networks

Secure encrypted connections, site-to-site, and between site and remote users, underpin the security and integrity of your business data. Only properly authorised and authenticated users will gain access to your critical systems and information, in a simple and easy to manage security domain. Appropriate choice of protocols and endpoints allows an optimum mix of security and ease of use.

Wireless Connection

Whether remote users connect to the Internet using broadband, public WiFi access, or through their mobile service provider using GPRS or 3G, they can stay in touch and access business data wherever they are at home or abroad whilst paying only local connection rates.

Mobile PDA Phones

Boffins will configure your mobile phones running Windows, Apple, or Symbian operating systems to connect directly to your Exchange servers for automatic delivery of email on the run. With low cost internet packages remote users never need to be out of touch with their colleagues or customers.

Voice Communication

Why stop at data? Having established connections into the 21st Century Business, and with the correct choice of PBX, remote users can communicate with colleagues and business contacts from within the network as endpoints on your private telephone exchange. Free or low cost trunking between offices and customers is enabled through SIP trunking and Voice over IP telephony. When out of range of the Internet mobile twinning allows your mobile to behave as an extension on the PBX for making, receiving, and transferring calls.

Voice Messaging

Intelligent call routing and voice messaging allows callers to quickly connect to the target party as well as leave messages for call back or action. By integrating voice messaging with your email systems users are quickly alerted to messages and you can be sure that your customers are looked after promptly.

Remote Access to Core Business Applications

To promote flexibility and reduce office costs, Boffins will equip your remote and casual workers with working access to your core business data and order processing applications, accounts systems, and other data intensive systems using Terminal Servers and Thin Clients, Laptops, or Netbooks. These low cost end point solutions enable fast terminal access but keeps your data secure and on site.

Publish Business Data

Provide easy access to company information, policies, marketing brochures, and other documents types through SharePoint to staff, colleagues, customers, and suppliers with appropriate security applied for public or restricted access across the Internet.

Newsletter June 2009

Newsletter

Dear Customer,

British Telecom’s 21st Century Network (see opposite) will revolutionise communications in the UK and will enable Boffins and its Customers to revolutionise the way we do our business. Better communication allows greater flexibility in the way we deploy our staff and resources saving costs, saving fuel, and possibly even saving the planet!

This is the main story in our June newsletter. As promised we start to bring together the building blocks to present a road map to the 21st Century business: Broadband, office and mobile telephony, remote access to email with shared calendars, Virtual Private Networks, firewalls and routers supporting quality of service for voice and data, terminal servers for business critical applications, thin clients, Share Point services for disseminating company information, laptops, PDA’s, and mobile printers.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a new Whitepaper “A Road Map to 21st Century Business” showing you how you can benefit from these business enabling technologies.

Register now for your copy.

Jim White
Boffins Computer Workshops

21st Century Business

Boffins is launching a Building Blocks initiative to help small and medium sized companies make the most of the latest developments in phone, broadband and IT.
A growing number of local telephone exchanges have recently been upgraded, with the result that businesses can now take advantage of improvements in connectivity across the UK, and harness these for more efficient business.

By using a Building Blocks approach, Boffins will help customers improve their businesses incrementally, at a pace and a cost that is best suited to their needs.

The Boffins box of Building Blocks includes:

• better broadband
• secure router access
• secure virtual private networks (VPNs)
• wireless connections on the move
• effective use of PDAs and BlackBerries
• the latest voice communications and smart voice messaging
• access to head office data from anywhere
• easy document sharing

Local exchanges that have already been upgraded as part of of a £10 billion investment by BT include: Aylesbury, Banbury, Bicester, Didcot, Milton Keynes, Oxford, Reading, Slough, Windsor and Maidenhead, and Wycombe.

This means that Boffins is now providing up to 24Mb broadband to businesses in these areas, whilst bringing together both voice and data into a single, high speed, IP based, routed network.

Special offers on Avaya phone system upgrades

In conjunction with world leading Avaya, we are pleased to announce special pricing of up to 40% off selected phone systems. Call us now on 01844 291110 for further information.

New customer referral scheme

Like all businesses we treasure new business that comes to us by word-of-mouth.

As one of our many satisfied customers, we’d welcome any recommendation you give us. We’ll ensure your referral receives our usual first class service, including a free, without obligation, needs analysis. Thank You.

Another Satisfied Customer

“Prevention of problems is very important to us – in the past we didn’t have that. It feels like a partnership rather than a regular client/supplier relationship and that has definitely been a key part of the success. We feel very comforted by the fact that we are in good hands and would absolutely recommend Boffins to any company.”

Dr Dave Casey
Technical Director
Neftex Petroleum Consultants

To Flexibility and Beyond!

More than 18 million of us use a car to commute to work.

Our average journey time is 27 minutes (rising to 43 if you’re a Londoner). Our roads are congested in the rush hour and the daily commute gets christened the daily grind.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Simply staggering working hours, or working from home just one day a week would make a dramatic difference to our road networks, and could also reduce overcrowding on public transport systems.

Add to this, staff well being and productivity, growing legislation covering flexible working for employees with young families, rising fuel costs, the green agenda and the need to reduce your carbon footprint, and the cost and logistics of finding and maintaining accessible office space. The case for flexibility in working conditions grows stronger by the week.

Up to now, its been the preserve of the large firms to embrace flexible working, mainly due to the cost and complexity of building a fast and reliable infrastructure to support the ongoing business activities.

However, emerging are initiatives such as BT’s 21st Century Network - which brings high speed connectivity, and convergence of voice and data into a single network - and IT service companies specialising in building low cost, sustainable solutions for smaller, local businesses.

Firms adopting this approach to business are already seeing benefits including reduced absenteeism due to illness, greater staff retention, greater productivity, and reduced operating costs.

At Boffins we believe the key to building a successful, flexible, 21st Century Business, is to have a coherent, step-by-step plan from the beginning. This will ensure that the right foundations are in place and will help avoid buying and implementing incompatible solutions
along the way.

To talk to us more about home working solutions, and IT efficiency, please call us on 01844 291110.

21st Century Businesses are dynamic, responsive, and accessible. Their customer care is driven by a desire to serve, not restricted by circumstance or location

21st Century Business owners and executives make quick judgements and decisions, and require on-demand access to their business systems, wherever they are, whatever they’re doing

21st Century Businesses have sales and customer service teams that respond without delay, they have customer data available to them anywhere, anytime

21st Century Businesses are flexible towards staff and customers, they no longer see size as limit to their aspirations.

Building Blocks to C21 Business

PRESS RELEASE: Business IT specialists Boffins Computer Workshops is launching a Building Blocks initiative to help small and medium sized companies make the most of the latest developments in phone, broadband and IT.

A growing number of local telephone exchanges have recently been upgraded, with the result that businesses can now take advantage of improvements in connectivity across the UK, and harness these for more efficient business.

By using a Building Blocks approach, Boffins will help customers improve their businesses incrementally, at a pace and a cost that is best suited to their needs.

The Boffins box of Building Blocks includes:
improved broadband with higher speeds
secure router access
secure virtual private networks (VPNs)
wireless connections on the move
effective use of PDAs and mobile phones
the voice over IP communications and smart voice messaging
access to head office data from anywhere
remote access to key business systems
easy document sharing

“We are now starting to see the impact of BT’s £10 billion investment programme in 21st century networks, with many local exchanges upgraded,” says Tony Dawes, Boffins’ technical director. “The upgrades unlock a whole range of new possibilities, from flexible working to seamless IT connections with customers and suppliers.”

“Most obviously, both businesses and householders have access to faster, lower cost broadband, but this is just the start of a revolution in communications. Smaller businesses now gain access to a whole host of efficient, flexible ways of working previously only available to blue chip companies who used to pay handsomely for them.”

‘We’re on hand to make the transition simple and cost-effective. And in these tight times, our Building Blocks approach means our customers can upgrade their efficiency and their systems on a step by step basis.”
The 21st Century Network is the result of a £10 billion investment by BT that will replace all their exchange equipment by 2012, bringing together both voice and data into a single, high speed, IP based, routed network.

Local exchanges that have already been upgraded include: Aylesbury, Banbury, Bicester, Didcot, Milton Keynes, Oxford, Reading, Slough, Windsor and Maidenhead, and Wycombe. Boffins is now providing up to 24Mb broadband to businesses in these areas.

Adds Dawes: “We are offering Building Blocks to both existing and new customers, for whom our plain-speaking approach is often welcomed as a refreshing change. By taking the jargon out of IT, we are able to transform our customers’ ways of doing business, making them more efficient and customer-focused.”

“The key to building a successful 21st Century Business is to have a coherent, step-by-step plan from the beginning. This will ensure that the right foundations are in place and will help avoid buying and implementing incompatible solutions along the way.”

Neftex

CASE STUDY: Neftex Petroleum Consultants Ltd is the world leader in the provision of web-based sequence stratigraphic data and interpretations to the hydrocarbon industry. The company provides an online digital Global Earth Model to clients (developed using sequence stratigraphy) including all supporting data. Using this model it delivers global strategic efficiencies, synergies and value for its client companies, through both its licensed products and consulting services.

Personal service

Neftex was looking for a different kind of IT support - “more personalised, and dedicated” than its incumbent supplier - and was in desperate need of a
server upgrade.

Comfort zone

The group approached Boffins on the basis of a recommendation and referral. “They gave an excellent presentation,” says Neftex Technical Director Dr Dave Casey. “We felt very comfortable that we would get a great service from them. They seemed to have a personal approach to support – which turned out to be true. And we liked the fact that they obviously did lots of pre-emptive work to prevent problems.”

On time… under budget

Boffins’ recently implemented a new server system to replace the existing outdated one. The company installed a 90-user EBS on four Hewlett Packard blade servers with a separate data security system. Delivering on time and under budget – with an additional server supplied for free – the company impressed Neftex enormously. “They understood exactly what was needed and worked very hard to ensure there was no disruption of our day-to-day business,” says Dr Casey. “We even made savings on the cost of the implementation.”

Going the extra mile

As for ongoing IT support, Dr Casey says the company now has the continuity it needs. “Boffins’ staff are very experienced and they understand exactly what is needed.” He has also been impressed by the company’s flexibility. “We have clients around the world, and Boffins never leaves us in the lurch. What we also like is that they are helpful in recommending things but are never pushy with it.”

Final verdict

Dr Casey says that since hiring Boffins the company feels much more in control of its IT Infrastructure. “Prevention of problems is very important to us – in the past we didn’t have that. It feels like a partnership rather than a regular client/supplier relationship and that has definitely been a key part of the success. We feel very comforted by the fact that we are in good hands and would absolutely recommend Boffins to any company.”