QUBICGROUP.COM
DRIVING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH PEOPLE, TECHNOLOGY AND PROCESS
The biggest change of our time, Digital Transformation is really accelerating the pace of that change. How you embrace Digital Transformation can determine the future of your business – it can even determine if your business has a future.
Digital Transformation is now about how, not when. Digital Transformation doesn’t just change your internal processes; it can fundamentally change the way you do business. Agile, digitally savvy, brand new competitors can spring up ‘overnight’ – what taxi firm or hotel chain saw
Uber or AirBnB coming? The way your customers engage with you or even find you has changed beyond all recognition.
The inexorable march to digital will change everything; who your competitors are, how your market works, the way you make decisions, engage with customers, manage your supply chain, develop products, bring them to market, the list goes on. So how do you navigate your way through the digital choices? Where do you turn for advice and guidance? Who can you rely on to help you meet your digital future? Qubic.
“Change is the only constant in life”
Qubic has been digitally transforming organisations through; people, technology and process for over 20 years
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Qubic has a team of highly-skilled and highly-experienced people, many of whom have been with the business for over twenty years: it is this blend of experience and knowledge that sets us apart.
The team will work with you to understand your business now, where it needs to be and what constraints there are. Using our expertise, we’ll design your digital transformation roadmap before taking you on the journey, at your side the whole way.
Our team will design and commission the new technology then, through our on-boarding process, your business and your people make
the transition. Our technical support team’s will constantly monitor your systems to keep them safe, secure and operational – if issues do arise we are available to remotely fix or if needed, one of our team will come to your site.
The experience we have gained allows us to come up with creative solutions to problems – combining experience and our core network design lets our engineers think ‘outside the square’.
With an eye to the future, our account management team will work with you to develop and manage a continuous digital transformation plan that keeps you ahead of the wave.
People
The Qubic team has gained its experience by
taking many organisations on their digital
transformation journey over the years
When it comes to technology, Qubic only partners with industry leading hardware and service providers for Digital Transformation. Qubic doesn’t simply churn out pre-packaged products; we design a solution that’s right for you using our own infrastructure and a blend of technology from world-class organisations including Microsoft, HP, Cisco, Mitel and Vodafone.
At the heart of our Digital Transformation technology is the Qubic core. This platform is built across multiple UK datacentres that are highly secure. Our core servers are interconnected across the datacentres by multiple high-capacity circuits from multiple Tier 1 service providers. This core design results in a robust, secure, highly resilient environment. The core lets us create high-availability managed solutions for our customers that are kept secure and up to date by our technical support teams.
Connectivity to our hosted services is fast and secure. We provide connectivity ranging from business broadband to high-speed enterprise grade circuits. We take ‘wires only’ circuits from the likes of Vodafone, BT Openreach or Level 3 that go directly from our customers’ premises to the Qubic core without crossing the public internet. This makes access to the hosted services fast and secure; break-out to the internet is provided from our core.
We offer enterprise-grade managed hosted telephony using Mitel technology using the same; environment, core network, connectivity and security regime. The hosted Mitel is licence driven and gives different features to different users depending on their needs, from a full blown compliant multi-media contact centre to a flexible mobile workforce. The Mitel system tightly integrates with Skype for Business to help deliver the agility any modern business needs.
Technology
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Qubic customers have total peace-of-mind that their digital information is managed securely and compliantly
Qubic has robust processes in place to help deliver Digital Transformation. Underpinning everything we do is ISO: 9001, the internationally recognised Quality Management standard that gives our customers reassurance that we have robust, recorded processes in place to manage all aspects of our business.
When it comes to bringing about the change, we employ PRINCE2 process-based project management methodology to help deliver on
time and with the minimum of disruption. Security of data is massively important to all our customers but to some, particularly in Professional Services, their data security is governed by legislation and compliance directives from professional bodies.
Qubic holds the ISO 27001:2013 Security accreditation that lays out robust processes for managing both its own data and our customers’ data.
Process
Qubic pricing is bespoke to every client due to the complexity of the solutions we deliver across Voice, Data and Connectivity. However, it helps our clients to have an understanding of
the spectrum of costs at the start of the process so we have tried to give some indicative pricing structures as follows.
Case Studies
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Voice We partner with the market leading vendor Mitel to deliver cloud telephony solutions to our clients. The servers are hosted in our cloud with our secure connectivity to the clients site with normal IP phones on desks.
We can deliver a phone on a desk in 48 hours from £15 per user per month, with no upfront costs.
Data We partner with the market leading vendor Microsoft to deliver the full 365 software suite and hardware partners HP, Dell and Lenovo to deliver servers, desktops and laptops. We deliver this using the Qubic cloud or Microsoft Azure and we can provide installation and support from £50 per user per month with no upfront costs.
The Microsoft licensing costs are the same whether you buy from Qubic or Microsoft, so the peace of mind of having access to Qubic engineers in the U.K. 24/7/365 makes our offering unique.
Connectivity The most important element for any truly hosted and secure cloud service is connectivity. We all have different flavours of broadband in our homes but this is not suitable for your business network.
We partner with market leading vendors BT, Vodafone and Level 3 to deliver super-fast, secure and low latency data pipes into our clients sites from £30 per month. Pricing is bespoke and tailor made to the voice and data solution we are delivering and we price promise all our circuits to ensure we remain competitive at all times.
QUBICGROUP.COM
Qubic Group plc Qubic HouseC1 The CourtyardAlban ParkHatfield RoadSt AlbansAL4 0LA
020 8936 [email protected]. qubicgroup.com
Qubic Group plc is an expert technology company that provides enterprise grade hosted voice and data services in addition to traditional localised services. It takes building blocks from industry leaders and combines them to add value through people, technology and process.
QUBICGROUP.COM
YOUR 10 POINT
DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION
CHECKLIST
Where is your business going – set the strategy
Qubic has been digitally transforming
organisations through; people, technology
and process for over 20 years
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For example, what regulatory requirements do
you need to comply with or what is your key
customer demographic and how would they
prefer to interact with you?
Set your business strategy then decide what
best supports that in term of technology not the
other way around.
Many businesses feel that they ought to be
changing their business to embrace the latest
technology – don't you think that might be the
wrong way round?
We recommend that you look at your business,
the direction you want to take and what external
influences there are that will affect your direction
of travel.
Undertake a STEP analysis – what Social,
Technological, Economic and Political factors will
affect your business.
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Do you need to own IT?
Companies that own their IT, and in particular,
servers can be put in a position where capacity of
the hardware has been reached or exceeded and
the cost to add to or upgrade the entire system
falls outside the Capital Expenditure budget. By
moving to virtual servers, resources can simply be
added or removed as and when required by
varying the monthly
Do you need to own your servers or do you want
the performance with a flexible facility?
If you move to a hosted environment you need to
be aware of the different tiers of datacentre that
are available and make sure that your Digital
transformation partner is making the right
recommendations. The body responsible for
creating the standards is the Telecommunications
Industry Association (TIA), the specific standards
relating to datacentre being TIA-942.
There are currently four levels Tier 1 to Tier 4 with
Tier 1 providing basic hosting facilities up to Tier 4
for mission critical applications. For most business
applications we would recommend that you look
for Tier 3 and above.
Decide what level of security and uptime your
business needs to determine the datacentre tier
that you need.
Hosting environment
High Availability
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A High Availability environment involves
replicating your entire setup – servers,
applications and data – in a second datacentre.
This almost completely eliminates downtime and
gives excellent resilience, if there is an issue with
the service at one datacentre, the other
immediately takes over with minimal or no loss of
service. There is a price premium to pay for High
Availability.
Do you need to have a highly resilient service or
could you live without it for a few hours every
now and again?
Typical domestic broadband and some business
broadband is acceptable for internet use but there
are two key factors that you need to consider for
use with a hosted service.
Most broadband services are shared services. If
other customers of the service are watching
iPlayer or viewing videos on YouTube, the speed of
your connection will be considerably reduced.
To overcome these issues, Qubic, for example, can
offer broadband services that connect directly to
its datacentres without crossing the public
internet.
Could you operations cope with regular periods
of slower performance?
Broadband
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How you embrace Digital transformation
can determine the future of your business
Applications
Traditionally, companies bought licences for
applications such as Office, accounting software,
CRM software etc. As a result, they were often
stuck with legacy versions that were expensive to
upgrade out of Capital Expenditure. Now,
contracting to Software as a Service (SaaS) you pay
a monthly fee to use an application and whenever
there is an upgrade or a change, you get it within
your fee.
Do you want to own software licences or do you
want to always have the latest version available?
Traditional backups were taken on tapes or other
external devices and were often overwritten as
part of the regime. The frequency of backups
tended to be daily.
Could your business recover with a backup that
was 24 hours old?
Qubic takes incremental backup as frequently as
every 15 minutes and keeps all of the backups so
you could restore back to any point.
Backups
Cybersecurity
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Anti-virus software can help but only once the
'signature' of the virus has been recognised.
Relying just on this type of signature based
protection can leave your entire system open to
brand new threats like Ransomware and human
error.
Consider a multi-layered cyber security approach.
Personal Devices
Most people have a personal smartphone or
tablet and may want to connect to your network.
There is a balance to be struck between allowing
your staff to work flexibly and keeping your
network secure.
Think about a policy for Bring Your Own Device
(BYOD).
How critical is technical support. 24/7 support
may seem attractive but might be too expensive.
Would it be better to have your core monitored
24/7 and have your users supported during
working hours for example?
Determine you actual support requirements
thinking about the ways in which your teams
work.
Technical Support
QUBICGROUP.COM
Qubic Group plc
Qubic House
C1 The Courtyard
Alban Park
Hatfield Road
St Albans
AL4 0LA
020 8936 7091
www. qubicgroup.com
Qubic Group plc is an expert technology
company that provides enterprise grade hosted
voice and data services in addition to traditional
localised services. It takes building blocks from
industry leaders and combines them to add
value through people, technology and process.