“The 2016 Cisco ANZ Partner Insight Awards celebrate our high achieving partners in the industry, and AINS is a deserving winner of Small Business Partner of the Year and their success in selling, deploying and supporting bespoke Cisco based solutions is testament to that recognition. The contributions and achievements of AINS as a Cisco business partner in 2015 were outstanding,” said Jason Brouwers, Director of the Partner Business Group for Cisco Australia and New Zealand.

George Pezzutto, Sales Director of AINS, said, “Cisco solutions are globally recognised as best-of-breed in the enterprise space. AINS is committed to delivering value-for-money, Cisco based, solutions to SMB and growing businesses.”

The Cisco Partner Insight Awards acknowledge and celebrate excellence and innovation within the ANZ partner community, with categories including; innovative and architecture-led approach to success, business differentiation and strategic outcomes, and deep customer understanding.

Winners were selected by a group of Cisco Australia and New Zealand partner and country executives.

About AINS – Founded in 1996, AINS is a trusted provider of managed ICT solutions to SMBs, Enterprises and Government around the world.

With its many years of experience, broad range of capabilities and expertise, industry leading vendor solutions and state-of-the-art network backbone infrastructure, AINS helps enterprises achieve their business strategic goals through delivery of quality-focused ICT solutions.

AINS is a Cisco Premier Certified Partner, recognised for our specialisation in Cisco Advanced Collaboration Architecture. As a Cisco Premier Certified Partner, AINS has access to an increased level of support from Cisco, including access to best-in-class products and services, and technical support.

Cisco, the Cisco logo, and Cisco Systems are registered trademarks of Cisco Systems Inc. in the United States and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.

For those unfamiliar with the term “Collaboration”, it is Cisco’s description for the suite of products launched recently to replace its previous Unified Communications products. Cisco’s vision is to take Unified Communications, which was focused on unifying communications technology, to the next level. Collaboration is focused on aligning people with communications technology together to enhance competitive advantage..

Over the decades, Cisco’s products had mushroomed into a vast range of disparate platforms to address different business IT requirements. In recent years, after vigorous culling of their SMB products, Cisco has finally released a product that is innovative and has us genuinely excited.

One of our great strengths here at AINS, is to bring value-for-money back to IT solutions. We continuously look for ways to bring big-business technical solutions within reach of small and medium sized businesses. Cisco appears to have delivered that with the Business Edition 6000S (BE6000S or BE6KS).

The BE6000S replaces quite nicely the Cisco UC500 phone systems of a few years ago. It comes with more features and integrates many of the previous disparate technical platforms into one single platform, ensuring streamlined deployment and ease of use.

Simply put, the Cisco BE6000S is an all-in-one IP PBX, Router and Server with many advanced Audio, Video and Text communication features.

Having achieved our coveted Advanced Cisco Collaboration Architecture certification, we’ve sold quite a number of Cisco BE6000 based collaboration solutions to enterprises all around Australia. In fact, we achieved the Cisco Front Runner Award for having sold and deployed the most Cisco Collaboration solutions in Australia in Q1 2015.

The BE6000S is based on the same software and technology that Cisco use for multinational corporations, but it is licensed with features that are better suited to the needs of smaller organisations. It is a great product that can handle many different aspects of collaboration and enabling smarter and more productive workplaces in the modern organisation.

Finally, companies with less than 100 employees can now benefit from the same renowned Cisco technology that we’ve been supplying to larger enterprises.

The BE6000S provides excellent value-for-money as it really isn’t as cut down as you may think. Essentially the product allows a single hardware based solution to be deployed. Powerful routing capabilities, direct connections to ISDN and/or standard analogue lines for peace of mind, as well as computing hardware to run the Cisco Collaboration Applications, are all integrated into the one device.

To lower costs and ensure the platform is within reach of smaller businesses, Cisco has scaled down the computing hardware accordingly. This means the BE6000S can’t handle all the applications that its bigger BE6000 model can, and some enterprise capabilities such as Call Centre are missing. However, the technologies to enhance communications for a typical smaller or medium business, are all available in the BE6000S platform:

• Cisco Unified Call Manager for the core phone system.
• Cisco Unity Connection for advanced voicemail functionality.
• Cisco Instant Messaging and Presence for remote working and instant messaging.
• Paging to enable audio messages and announcements to be made.
• Cisco Prime Configuration Professional to enable self-management of phones if required.

Businesses will certainly benefit from improving its workforce flexibility with the Jabber UC client capable of being installed on all tablets, smart phones and PC’s.

Having reviewed many technology based solutions from many major vendors, it’s rare for solutions that has cascaded down from large-scale enterprise technology to not have its feature set dramatically reduced.

For many years, we’ve had clients wanting to implement to a Cisco based Unified Communications platform but could not afford the enterprise price-tags. Now finally, Cisco has listened to customer feedback and has made its world-leading Collaboration technology affordable for smaller businesses.

We truly believe this solution represents excellent value-for-money for growing and medium businesses.

We’re on a mission to let more Australian businesses know that next-generation communications does not have to be a choice between cheap and unreliable open source platforms, or bank-breaking enterprise platforms. There is a middle ground – so let’s talk about how your business can migrate from  its open-source VOIP system, or aging PBX, and start benefiting from Cisco’s renowned reliability and superior technology, today!

Enterprises everywhere have embraced virtualisation technology to create “private clouds” that are centrally hosted from the enterprise data centre. In fact, many mid-size and smaller enterprises, have gained substantial cost, agility, innovation and competitive advantages by completely outsourcing their private Cloud infrastructure to experienced, SLA backed Cloud Providers such as AINS.

Increasingly, early enterprise adopters of the private cloud are expanding into the hybrid cloud, to broaden their focus from the applications to the workloads.

Hybrid clouds enable enterprises to control the cost of IT by leveraging the resources of a public cloud provider if and when required while maintaining security by storing sensitive data in the private cloud. Additionally, hybrid clouds enable enterprises to shift the cost  from per unit of compute or store, to cost per workload and substantially enhances enterprise agility, flexibility and IT scalability .

Ultimately, hybrid clouds allows organisations to leverage the capabilities of public cloud platform providers without offloading the entirety of their data to a third-party data centre. This provides a great deal of flexibility in computing tasks, while keeping the most vital components secured behind the company firewall.

Despite the benefits, implementing hybrid clouds can present technical, business and management challenges as they require API compatibility and appropriate network connections that are robust and scalable.

AINS expert consultants can help enterprises to confidently step from the private cloud to the hybrid cloud, further enhance organisational agility, flexibility and ultimately, increased competitiveness.

One approach to ensuring highly scalable networks of the future, is to move the network into the Cloud with Network as a Service and Software Defined Data Centres.

Ultimately, organisations will continue to require high bandwidth connections from their premises to their private Cloud and the Internet. And the demand for increasingly greater bandwidth will continue unabated in the foreseeable future, driven by Big Data, High Definition Video and Media Rich Content.

To prevent network congestion and performance degradation, enterprise networks need to deploy connectivity mediums that can rapidly scale up to meet the demands of organisational requirements in the most cost effective way possible. Currently, only Fibre Optic based Ethernet is capable of enabling rapid scalable networking with symmetric throughput of up to 10 gigabit per second.

However, while fibre optic connections are increasingly becoming more prevalent, substantial challenges with availability and costs still exist, particularly in Australia. Organisations that are not connected to the Internet using fibre technology, or have not deployed fibre connectivity to locations with high worker density, will undoubtedly face substantial challenges related to productivity, user satisfaction and containing costs.

AINS has access agreements with all carrier networks in Australia to provide us with the greatest network reach and the ability to arrange connections at affordable costs. Additionally, through our Strategic IT Planning and our Solution Architect services, AINS can help organisations to identify current bandwidth demands, project future requirements and plan ahead to meet future capacity requirements in a cost effective way and before they become problematic.

Strategic IT planning is critical to eliminate wastage and ensuring maximum ROI for IT investments.

More than ever, CIOs need to understand what the important IT trends are for the next half decade. Currently, the IT landscape is going through at least 5 major “generational” changes and the following trends weigh heavily on the minds of CIOs around the world:

1. Increasing demand by end users for personalised, immediate access to content and applications anywhere, anytime and on any device.
2. Shifting of delivery platforms to disparate mobile devices, into the cloud and into social media platforms.
3. Reinvention of communication and collaboration channels across the Web, mobile devices and in social media.
4. Innovation driven by consumer technology.
5. Big data driven by the ever increasing, multitudinous applications, devices and monitoring systems deployed, and the ever increasing need for quantitative analysis of everything.

Moreover, workers are now demanding many of these innovations and expecting their organisations to provide something close in capability to what they can get nearly for free (or actually for free) on their own devices and networks. Managers and executives are typically pushing for service delivery on next-generation mobile devices like the smartphones and tablets, much easier to use IT solutions, and access to more collaborative and useful intranet capabilities.

To ensure that ROI for IT investments are maximised, it is critical that CIOs understand which of these trends are impacting on their organisation and be able to ensure that IT assets are capable of meeting business and user requirements, four or five years down the track.

AINS IT Strategic Planning Service is available to help CIOs gain a deeper appreciation of these technology trends, plan for emerging risks and opportunities and ensure greater return on IT investments by extending the asset lifecycle and maximising productivity.

]]> http://ains.com.au/maximising-roi/feed/ 0 http://ains.com.au/data-and-internet/ http://ains.com.au/data-and-internet/#comments Fri, 12 Oct 2012 01:38:58 +0000 http://192.168.53.202:10000/?p=37 Read more...]]> National Managed Service Provider, Australia Internet Solutions (AINS), has won a four-year, multi-million dollar contract to provide managed ICT services to Moreland City Council in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.

Under the deal – estimated to be up to $5 million over the life of the contract – AINS will provide internal Local Area Network (LAN) infrastructure management, Wide Area Network (WAN) and Dark Fibre services as well as IaaS/SaS/Private Cloud computing services to the Moreland Council.

AINS Sales Director, George Pezzutto, said a key component of the contracted solution was to allow for easy migration to the National Broadband Network (NBN) as and when the infrastructure becomes available.

He said the project involved migrating Moreland City Council’s current IT systems to Private Cloud computing, providing real time replication to heighten availability, and to enable the council to explore new ways of communicating with its constituents.

“AINS will also provide professional services on an ongoing basis and proactively manage Council’s investment.”

Pezzutto said Moreland City Council was a great example of how a business enterprise could answer the challenge of providing cost efficiencies, “especially relevant in today’s demanding financial climate.”

“A centralised IT network, on-demand computing and cost efficiencies are just some of the benefits of Cloud-based services. Moreland City Council has proved its team is progressive, it is innovative and, perhaps most importantly, it is willing to look ‘outside the square’ to explore new opportunities to better serve the community.”

According to Steven Wong, Managing Director of AINS, “rapidly growing cloud services are challenging businesses to govern and manage their IT environment, control costs and optimize delivery of their IT services internally and to their clients”.

As enterprises increase their cloud capabilities, they are struggling to manage them efficiently along with other IT resources.

Wong adds, “These days, everything is integrated and enterprises don’t look at the separate components of IT. Rather, businesses are looking at IT as a whole to deliver core business objectives. This has resulted in a shift of the underlying skillsets traditionally employed in an enterprise IT role and that is where our growth will come from in the next 3 years”.

As a long time telecommunications supplier AINS will leverage the experience and specialist skills that it has to provide complete Information, Communication and Technology solutions.

Initially AINS plans to achieve its first growth targets by introducing existing clients to the new product offerings. However according to Wong, increasingly businesses are demanding complete telco, cloud and managed services and uptake by new clients are expected to strong. “We are targeting 30% growth in the first year and that is conservative”, said Steven.

It seems, the era of Telco 2.0 has truly arrived.

”This deal was the culmination of our business realignment strategy initiated around 24 months ago to allow us to focus purely on our corporate and government clients”, Managing Director, Steven Wong said.

He said that the divestment of the residential customer unit was an important step in the company’s planned drive to ensure its exceptional level of service and further expand its customer base in the medium to enterprise market based around our full suite of ICT Solutions offerings.

Wong said that “The needs of consumer and corporate customers differed substantially and have evolved to the point where the synergies from sharing business systems, processes, skillsets etc have reduced significantly.”

He added that “By concentrating our resources toward our key accounts, some of which are in the BRW top 1000, we can now fully realise our business objectives for the whole organisation moving forward.

“While it is sad to sell off the consumer business as we had so many loyal customers express their desire to stay with us, we do believe that transferring our residential customers to a reputable ISP like IINET is the best thing to do as it will now free us up to single-mindedly focus on delivering exceptional quality of service to our business customers.”