At the recently-concluded CTIA 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's Carl Ford had a chance to talk with Manish Gupta, vice president of marketing from Kabira Technologies.
Noting that "kabira" means "large," Ford invited Gupta to talk about "the large things" the company does.
Kabira has been around for 13 years, Gupta said, and "we only focus on things that require scale," whether that be in financial services or telecommunications.
And when he says large the man means large - "Today we serve over 700 million subscribers around the world," customers of their providers.
Gupta noted that at the show Kabira announced a relationship with a company in Brazil named Kaizen, which works with VISA's partners in Brazil, as well as some of the telecom service providers in that country. They will do work on Kabira's fluency platform, Gupta said, "customize the applications, do some unique work both in financial services and in communications."
Recently at CTIA 2010 in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to sit down with Ronan Quinlan, managing director from Taoglas Limited for an interview.
So naturally, the first thing he wanted to know was, where'd you get that name?
Quinlan said he came up with it himself to symbolize the cross-cultural nature of the company - "I'm an Irishman but I moved to Taiwan twelve years ago."
The company is an M2M antenna provider, for the machine to machine telematics market.
The company doesn't do antennas for mobile phones or that kind of thing, Quinlan said, but higher-end stuff for "specific market needs," such as biometric devices, or in smart meters, or for "very reliable transmission systems" in general.
Trapeze Networks had a challenge - how to provide 24/7 access to information allowing options for self-service and interaction with the support team.
As the company has grown, the distributed, 24/7 nature of its business required self-service support capabilities, company officials said, adding that the bug tracking system that the company previously used for managing support tickets lacked a customer-facing component.
Trevis Schuh, VP of Worldwide Customer Service, said that based on their customers' feedback, Trapeze created a support portal requirement list which included a searchable knowledgebase, customizable support portal, ticket module, online discussion forum, a channel to get instant customer feedback, and customized reporting of metrics, among others.
"To log a ticket, customers had to email us or fill out a Web form and we had to then create the ticket manually, which increased the resolution times for customer cases," Sandeep Moza, senior customer advocate. "Customers also could not manage their issues online."
Recently TMC's Senior Editor Erin Harrison had a chance to speak with Todd Suddreth, government solutions manager for Panduit, and Darryl Benson, global solutions manager of connected buildings for Panduit.
The company's basic role is to help improve the delivery of government programs, increase operational efficiencies and government building programs, helping government "manage risk within the physical infrastructure."
Discussing Panduit's connected building work in government, Harrison noted that the government has earmarked $5.5 billion for full or partial modernization of federal buildings. Suddreth said that for such projects, a lot of the initial investment is in such areas as roofing, windows and the like.
What Panduit does, Suddreth said, is "extend the basic IP network to converge building systems, such a lighting or HVAC, on to a common platform that can be used to increase efficiencies and control," so that the user, "in this case the federal government," can better use and manage their assets.
When an employer says "flexible working" and "work-life balance," they can mean something different from the employee's definition.
The employer, naturally, wants to ensure staff availability at right times to meet customer demand, while the employee wants the freedom to pursue outside interests, and to schedule work around these activities.
In the call center industry, in which working mothers are the largest employee group, nearly seven out of ten agents prefer to work flexible hours. GMT has produced a white paper on this tricky balancing act for employee and employer, outlining the major benefits of call center workforce management.
Save on recruitment costs: Just as it is more expensive to win over new customers than to retain existing ones, it is good business to retain the people you have invested time, money and training in. Recruitment is expensive, and research shows that staff turnover is significantly lower in those organizations that have four or more work-life balance initiatives or flexible working practices.
