St. Louis-based Tech Electronics employs more than 250 people with regional offices in Springfield, Columbia, Illinois and Indiana. Tell me more about the communications firm. We are celebrating out 50th anniversary this year, a big milestone for us. Tech Electronics handles everything to do with communications – anything voice, data, security, video, fire alarm and access control.
Basically, voice used to be just telephone systems, but now voice and data have converged. Voice is now handled by IT people. There are many different applications that now fall under voice and data. We go in and work with companies from a network perspective for everything from telephone to voicemail, mobility and Web conferencing. We work with clients such as Integrity Home Care Inc., KY3 Inc., HealthMedX and national company Dura-Line. We also do all the voice and data for Pyramid Foods at all their stores, about 60 locations.
Voice over Internet Protocol has progressed by leaps and bounds in recent years. How have VoIP applications, such as Skype, impacted the way we communicate and conduct business? Skype is a way of communicating over the Internet. It’s not high quality, but it works for a lot of people in an interoffice setting or on a personal basis. It has really opened up a new way for people to communicate without expensive long distance charges.
There are many different kinds of VoIP. Like Skype, calls over the Internet would be one example with companies like Vonage, but I see it from many different perspectives. Another is how to actually run the phone system over a company’s data network. You used to have to have a separate cable run for phone systems and data systems, but now it’s all in one. It’s helping us eliminate duplicity of services. In the past, a company had to have one whole setup for voice and another whole setup for data. Now we can do it all and use a single infrastructure.
How can other emerging technologies help businesses reduce overhead and infrastructure costs? There are multiple ways. No. 1 way to save is through the overhead costs and infrastructures. As mentioned, if in the past they had a data structure for one thing and a voice circuit for something else, a lot of times we can combine this, and the company will save on their monthly operating expenses.
Secondly, when we go in, we look at what they are doing, taking kind of a holistic approach. Voice, data and video all tie together, so we can help the company bring those costs down, while increasing productivity and effectiveness.
How much they save all depends on the size of the business and what they’ve got. Phone bills are one of those things that people just pay they don’t always take time to look at or analyze. You have to be diligent about watching the bills and making sure your company is getting the best deals. We have all these bundled services now that we didn’t used to have. You have to really look at it and make sure things haven’t changed from what you signed up for.
In a small company, the savings could be $50 a month, but we have saved larger companies tens of thousands of dollars a month. It all just depends on what the company is working with.
You’ve been in the technology industry for 37 years. What is the biggest change you’ve seen during that time? I saw when we went from phones with big, thick wires to skinny cable, and I was there when we went from analog to digital.
I think going to Internet protocol and now to more and more applications that are considered virtual, has been the biggest leap. For companies, they can put virtual machines in their data centers, stacking multiple applications on the same servers. It brings a lot of value in terms of cost savings, management savings, even things like redundancy and having that backup automatically available.
What’s the next big thing coming down the technology pipeline? That’s a scary one. I think we are going to do more with mobility. More and more our applications and systems are going to be utilized on the move and we are seeing more meetings which are BYOD – bring your own device. People are OK with that because people want to be mobile and they want anywhere, any time communication in whatever method they choose.[[In-content Ad]]
