Accent Business Technology Canberra Office

Accent Business Technology has recently opened a new office in Canberra. This will enable us to provide improved service to our customers in the ACT and surrounding areas. By making ourselves more accessible to our Canberra customers, we are able to expand our reach and provide these organisations with a wider choice of vendors when seeking phone systems and other business communication solutions.

Through our 22 years in the communications industry, Accent Business Technology has become the company of choice for over 3,000 organisations in Sydney, Wollongong and the NSW South Coast. This is because our long standing partnerships with key industry vendors allow us to deliver cost effective solutions that deliver results for our clients. Our industry experience and ongoing training and certifications allow us to provide cost effective, proactive customer service.

We can provide business expertise to a host of Small to Medium Enterprises as well as Government Departments. Some of the products we sell and support are:

• Approved telephone systems from Telstra, Cisco, NEC, Mitel and Aastra
  
• Enterprise and SMB Business Products
  
• Contact Centre – small to hosted to complex multi sites
• Unified messaging/unified communications including presence
• Enterprise fax solutions
• Microsoft LYNC
• CCTV and security access
• Online ticketing system
• Nursecall
• Video conferencing (Tandberg, Webex and Lifesize)
• Natural Language Speech Recognition (NLSR) to customer applications including intelligent IVR
• Hosting
• Hosted solutions
• TPAC /MTA – Mobile tracking analysis of company assets to include mandown, OH&S reporting
• SMS/MMS messaging marketing campaign tools
• Design of hosted applications
• PA systems
• 24x7 help desk IT managed services
• Facilities management – desktop and communications
• Complex cabling

From the desk of our I.T. Services Manager

Yesterday, our helpdesk received an urgent request from a desperate client who had suffered a critical server outage sometime over the weekend. Now while we have sat down on many occasions with the local manager of this international client to share our vision on proactive managed services, they still prefer a break/fix type of arrangement. Hey that’s OK, not something we do a lot of these days but I have always held out hope they would see the light.

So after a quick call by one of our technicians we realised it required us onsite to resolve. This leaves the client without critical services and the employees twiddling their thumbs -  at least until we get there. 2 hours later our technician arrives onsite to discover 2 SCSI drives out of an array of redundant disks dead, and no way to recover but from backup. More downtime.

Luckily we have a pretty good DR system in place for this customer, and came prepared with some alternate drives. The sad part of the story is this could have all been avoided with proactive systems management in place.

Our proactive managed services would have alerted us weeks ago that a single drive was going to or had failed in that server, which is designed to cope with one drive failure. We would have sourced and replaced that defective drive inside 24 hours with no downtime to the client or their employees. When the second drive failed, the same process would have occurred – no downtime. This is a far better outcome than the reality they are facing now which is a day’s worth of lost productivity (were still recovering from backup as I type) and a rather large bill for something that was completely avoidable.

I have a feeling the next time I sit down with this client to talk about fixed fee proactive managed services, the outcome will be different.

Jason Childs

I.T. Services Director