Galway centre and WestBic provide complete services
Start-up and early-stage businesses in the west of Ireland are looked after by Galway Technology Centre and WestBic, the official EU Business Innovation Centre for the border, midland and western region. WestBic was set up in 1987 and GTC is a joint venture between it and Galway Chamber of Commerce, set up in 1994 after the closure of the Digital plant.
“Between the two organisations, we have headquarters in Galway and offices in Roscommon and Donegal,” said manager John Brennan. “We provide complete office facilities and support services to start-ups and more established small businesses. In Galway right now, there are more than 150 people working in 25 separate enterprises, from one-man bands to about 30 employees.”
A key part of the services provided is that a new business just has to plug in and start up, Brennan said. “The GTC provides the network, with data and telephony services and high-speed broadband connected to the Galway fibre Man. We went to VoIP just over two years ago after careful research.
“It might seem a fairly obvious move today but, at that time, we had a traditional phone system that was actually very good. What convinced us to make the change to the Cisco system specified by our supplier PlanNet21 was the sheer flexibility. In the Galway and Roscommon centres, we have constant change, with new tenants starting up and others adding staff or moving to larger spaces,” he said.
From needing a service engineer for all ‘adds, moves and changes’, GTC was enabled to configure the services for all tenants entirely through the management software.
“We can set up a new business from a simple virtual service, where the nominal landline is actually routed to an entrepreneur’s mobile or home phone, to a fully-featured contact centre through an additional module,’ ‘Brennan said.
The key point, he said, is that today’s small business entrepreneurs are mobile and certainly do not keep traditional office hours. “With our VoIP system each business and user can route in coming calls as they like and on the fly. Some will use a soft phone client on a laptop, for example, to pick up on messages and make calls anywhere there is broadband access, like wi-fi in a coffee shop. Others will just divert to their mobiles.
“That means all of their non-physical their work is completely independent of location,’ ‘Brennan said. “There are cost savings as well, for our tenants and for GTC and West Bic between locations. “But the huge benefit is the digital flexibility and the ability to integrate telephony with applications like CRM. For management, it is a matter of minutes to provide or change the resources allocated to each tenant.”
