Cost savings, scalability and easy setup are just a few of the ways your business will benefit when replacing your traditional phone systems with VoIP technology. Continue reading “Switching Your Business to VoIP”
Category: Product News
Vox launches visitor management solution
Vox has launched a modular, cloud-based visitor management solution aimed at providing business and other organisations with a way to not only accurately keep track of people and vehicles entering their premises, but manage the collected information in a way that complies with upcoming privacy regulation.
“Vox Visitor Management provides customers with an electronic way to invite and track visitor movements into high traffic areas including business parks and large residential estates,” says Rudi Potgieter, senior product manager at Vox. “It sits within our Guardian Eye stable, and forms part of our drive to take technical complexity away from customer premises so that they can better focus on their core business.”
As a hosted service, there is minimal hardware or date stored onsite. The often tried and tested visitor log book with tear away slips at access control points are not compliant with the Protection of Personal Information (PoPI) Act, and migrating to a digital system will help customers in their efforts to become compliant before the regulation is enforced.
“We are going to market with a competitive subscription-based service; there is a hardware rental fee for the handheld devices and a license fee that depends on whether the customer selects the “Visitor Management” and “Visitor Management Pro” version,” says Potgieter. “There are additional modules, such as SMS notifications, long-term information storage (beyond the two month standard), and more depending on customer requirements that can be added on.”
Enhancing safety and security
Guards at access control points are equipped with rugged terminals, which can be configured to enable closed user group VoIP calls and GSM-based failover service.
“Depending on the customers requirements, we can extend the offering to add in WiFi connectivity at the guardhouse and SIM cards for the devices,” adds Potgieter.
Having access to real-time information about the number of people are on the premises is especially helpful in adhering with Safety, Health, Environment and Quality guidelines; if there is need to carry out an evacuation, the responsible stakeholders can accurately ensure that everyone is accounted for.
A further safety benefit is that Visitor Management is linked to the SA Police’s Unicode database, which means that guards can be alerted to vehicles that are identified as having been involved in the commission of a crime.
Comprehensive visitor management
The Visitor Management provides the user with just a digital logbook, giving them a regulatory compliant way to keeping track of people and vehicles entering and exiting their premises, while the Visitor Management Pro provides a comprehensive offering to larger customers that need additional requirements taken into account, including workflows and notifications.
Through a web-based portal, users of the advanced version can invite visitors, with emails being automatically sent to the recipient. Apart from a computer-generated PIN or QR Code that will be used to gain entry, emails can be customised to include a calendar invite attachment, maps and directions, and more. Hosts can be notified via email or SMS when their guests arrive and leave the premises.
The amount of information needed – beyond just the license and registration disc – can also be set depending on the customers business requirements, and the visitor management system can be hardwired into a gate, such as Gate Guard, in which case the gate or boom will not open unless all the required data has been captured.
Depending on the customers standard operating procedure, additional parameters can be set, including how often a vehicle can enter and exit, or how long it can stay on the premises. If these are exceeded a notification is sent to the relevant persons, and it will then depend on whether the guard is authorised to make a decision, or if he/she has to alert their supervisor to the situation.
“From a security perspective, there is no single solution that can act as a silver bullet; everything we do in our Guardian range is built to be modular, with each added layer further improving security. While our products are interoperable – be it visitor management, automatic number plate recognition or surveillance – the benefit of choosing Vox across the stack means that customers have a more holistic approach to security and a single point of accountability,” concludes Potgieter.
Understanding Long Term Evolution (LTE)
Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the technology behind your phone’s 4G network, and gives you high-speed broadband data on the move. Continue reading “Understanding Long Term Evolution (LTE)”
Inspiring the Next Generation
This National Women’s Month, we’re shining a light on the fabulous females in tech who are disrupting the industry and driving innovation forward, despite still being a minority.
History proves that the first computers weren’t machines and the first programmers weren’t men. But despite the advancements the Ada Lovelaces and Annie Easleys of the world made decades ago, gender diversity in the technology industry is still a challenge.
According to a recent study, only 23%* of tech jobs are held by women in South Africa. However, that’s not to say there aren’t a handful of note-worthy females holding the torch high for those who want to follow in their footsteps.
Here, we round them up:
Barbara Mallison
Co-founder, Obami
“Instead of being intimidated by the dominance of men in the tech sector, women should see it as an ideal opportunity to bring a unique set of strengths and skills to the market”
Mallinson has been hailed as one of the founders of the local social e-learning platform used by schools and organisations in Africa, Europe and America. Founded in 2007, Obami is shaping the future generations by connecting them to teachers, learners, NGOs and government – all while enabling them share educational resources and assess them based on their performance.
Judith Owigar
“Innovation is simply finding better ways to do things. Don’t stress about tech, use what you have to improve lives – that is real innovation”
Co-founder, JuaKali and Akirachix
The Kenyan native is one of the most popular female tech leaders in Africa and is using the industry as a catalyst to ignite social change in the country. By educating the youth through technology, she believes she can increase the quality of life in Kenya and therefore change the world. It’s this that drove her to create JuaKali – an online and mobile directory for Kenya’s skilled blue-collar workers – as well as Akirachix, a company that nurtures generations of women who use technology to develop innovations and solutions for Africa.
Sheryl Sandberg
COO, Facebook
“I want every little girl who’s told she’s bossy, to be told instead she has leadership skills”
If you Google her name, she comes up as one of the most powerful women in the world. Snapping her up from a position at Google in 2007, Mark Zuckerberg appointed Sandberg as his COO off the bat. Her book about grief and the loss of her husband, Option B, topped the bestseller list and inspired the masses – as did Lean In that’s aimed at women in the workplace. Sandberg is also behind Facebook’s war on Fake News, pushing hard to head off increased regulations on social media companies.
Annette Muller
Founder, DotNxt
“If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room!”
Driven by her passion of building and leading innovative and sustainable businesses, Muller is at the forefront of the South African tech sphere. She owns DotNxt – a Cape Ton-based company that creates, develops and delivers software, mobile, social and other digital development projects for local companies. Muller is also a coveted speaker and digital change agent, where she aims to inspire people and companies all around the world to bring a different type of edge to their business.
Anne Amuzu
Co-founder, Nandimobile
“Take time to talk to young people in school and in other programs so the students can understand what entrepreneurship is and begin to consider it as a career path”
Incepted by Amuzu in 2010, Nandimobile, develops software that helps companies deliver customer support and information services through SMS. As a graduate of Ghana’s Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, Amuzu is a firm believer in uplifting tech entrepreneurs in Africa by being a role model and educating scholars on how it’s done.
*Source: Women in Tech ZA
Vox partners with Veeam to extend managed backup services
Vox has extended its partnership with Veeam, the leader in intelligent data management for hyper-available enterprises to deliver a fully managed backup offering for customers in the mid to large corporate segment.
Storage and backup is a crucial necessity and very also very much a matter of security. If you don’t know where your data is, and you don’t have a backup strategy, you lose control of your data quickly. So the question becomes how to create a data storage strategy that is robust, protected, has a good backup and disaster recovery plan.
“Some customers cannot, or simply do not want to manage their own environments and this extends to backups and ensuring secure data storage,” says Craig Freer, executive head: Cloud and Managed Services at Vox.
Veeam Backup and Replication provides the ability to backup all workloads, ensuring that these are always recoverable in the event of outages, attack, loss or theft. Coupled with Vox managed services, customers will have the peace of mind that comes from knowing their data is secure, managed and backed up.
Concludes Freer, “Businesses can no longer rely on a single backup solution when it comes to ensuring that both their systems data are secure. Building in redundancy and managing the environment are as critical as back-ups.”
Vox looks to the channel to capitalise on virtual data centre demand
Vox is looking to extend its virtual data centre offering by making it available to its channel partners.
“We believe there is a good revenue opportunity, especially for managed services providers, that cannot afford to purchase the full cloud infrastructure,” says Craig Freer, executive head of Cloud and Managed Services at Vox.
Since the launch of its Virtual Data Centre offering in 2017, Vox has seen a significant uptake by customers, and believes that by extending availability to its channel, that more companies can leverage the power of the cloud to transform their business.
Adds Freer, “We do still have customers that work directly with us and this is unlikely to change, but we are keen to grow out channel and extend our solutions footprint. Finding ways to empower our channel to sell solutions and services like our Virtual Data Centre (VDC), means we can grow a thriving and profitable ICT eco-system that is based on value and value-for-money.”
Channel partners that are interested in offering VDC to their customers can contact Vox to find out how to benefit from this offering.
Vox Takes Agri-Tech to the Land and Seas
In the weeks leading up to the launch of the Vox Internet of Things (Vox IoT) in April 2018, CEO Jacques du Toit and Senior Product Manager Deon Oosthuysen showcased our latest offering – Vox Agri-Tech – at the recent Wildlife Ranching South Africa (WRSA) Conference, and Agricultural Seil-Safari (Sail-Safari) respectively. Continue reading “Vox Takes Agri-Tech to the Land and Seas”
Vox launches unique cloud backup solution for SA business
Vox has collaborated with cloud services brokerage First for Cloud and global software company, Veeam to bring to market a best of breed cloud-based backup solution to help local business better protect their information.
As companies digitise more of their operations, the data collected and stored becomes increasingly valuable to running and growing their business. Apart from having to mitigate for hardware or software caused issues, the rapid growth of cybercrime makes it critical for businesses to backup their data.
“This is usually done with the backup information being stored on a server that sites within the same data centre or premises. However, if you look at best practice, you need to have multiple copies of a backup, including one that is stored off site to ensure a higher level of protection against data loss,” says Craig Freer, Vox Executive Head for Cloud and Managed Services.
“Vox Cloud Backup for Veeam enables customers who have Veeam as their onsite backup software solution to connect and automatically store their backups securely to the Vox cloud platform, helping them de-risk their business in this area.”
The product leverages Veeam’s modern backup technology, including forever incremental backups, GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) retention policies and more. A console gives customers the ability to recover data for restores, track their consumption, and receive reminders for hosted storage renewals.
“This product brings together three leading companies, each with its own strengths; Vox provides a local cloud storage platform offering the highest levels of security and reliability, First for Cloud has a broad customer and distribution base, and Veeam brings best-of-breed backup software,” says Freer.
Every modern company has growing volumes of valuable data; as such, Vox Cloud Backup for Veeam is targeted at businesses ranging all the way from large corporations down to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that are already running Veeam on-premise.
According to Freer, the product is unique in that it is available for purchase online, and is easy for system administrators to install and configure. Primary support for the product will be provided by Veeam, with issues being escalated to Vox should there be the requirement to do so.
“We’re seeing tremendous growth in the backup space, especially in light growing incidents of malware and ransomware; the reality is if you have an attack on your server and you don’t have a backup, that information is lost. Using a cloud-based backup facility gives them an added layer of redundancy” adds Freer.
Vox IoT solutions to take tracking to the next level
Vox is launching several fully-managed Internet of Things (IoT) based solutions that are secure, power efficient, cost effective and simple to deploy on any scale, large or small.
When coupled with advanced analytics, big data collection will bring new security options including asset and animal tracking to South African customers.
As user requirements expand, tamper and tracking, asset, animal, utility and security devices are being deployed pervasively on movable assets like vehicles or trailers, on animals and in less accessible places. End users want to know much more than just location, with proactive notifications of out of the ordinary behaviour and activity allowing them to identify and track trends, amongst other features.
Vox has positioned itself as a network neutral platform provider and will support NB-IOT, LTE-M1, LoRa and Sigfox technologies. “This is going to be like Beta vs VHS” – du Toit says. Vox has initially partnered with leading operator Sqwidnet, the provider of Sigfox technology in South Africa. Sqwidnet has the lowest price point from a hardware and connectivity perspective and the technology extends to more than 42 countries. These “Things” could include any object embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators and coupled with network connectivity to collect and exchange data, communicate and control objects remotely.
Simply put, Low Powered WAN technology (Sigfox & LoRA) works well in situations where devices need to send small amounts of data over a wide area while maintaining battery life over many years. This distinguishes LPWAN from other wireless network protocols like Cellular with regards to bandwidth and range capability.
Adds du Toit, ¨The Sigfox network is unique in that towers can transmit information over long distances – up to 90 kilometres or more in the regions from a single base station with very low emissions and a small visual impact.”
Secure, cost-effective asset tracking
While tracking in itself is not new, it has traditionally been reliant on GSM networks – which are expensive to adopt and maintain, and have a higher power consumption requirement to transmit data. Furthermore, GSM devices are now increasingly susceptible to being disrupted, with signal jammers the size of a cell phone making theft of movable assets much easier and untraceable.
“Apart from the signal being harder to interfere with, our IoT devices are self-powered and don’t draw power from an external source, says du Toit,
“Other embedded sensors measure temperature, battery life, occasionally provide GPS co-ordination and detect if someone is trying to tamper with the IoT device”.
Depending on how frequently the device transmits information, the IoT devices support a low power design and up to 10-year autonomy. The IoT devices can support anything from 2 to 50 to 100 to 140 transmission frames per day. At 140 transmission frames – that is 1 message every 15 minutes.
All telemetry information is collected and analysed in the cloud, which is shared with end-users through online websites or mobile applications. Bulk users will have the ability to customise the application to suite their business requirements.
In addition to steadily declining IoT device prices over the past few years, using an IoT network will help organisations to cut down on the operational costs of using traditional GSM networks, including SIM fees, network connection fees, and data costs.
Automated workflows will be a key differentiator for Vox – given the number of connected devices anticipated it will be impossible for humans to make action based decisions. We will be focussing on automation, starting off with basic workflows and advancing into AI and Machine Learning.
The market requires a lot of education wrt understanding the real meaning of AI – it is only the “silver bullet” if you know exactly what you want to achieve. A lot can be achieved without applying AI from inception
Tamper Alert
Doors, gates and windows are the weakest security points in a building or farm and as such, we have been able to bring to market an “early warning device” if you will, that notifies one when a door, gate or window is tampered with. This self-powered device is not susceptible to jamming technologies and will alert you once the device’s integrity has been breached, allowing business owners to secure any building at a low cost, while also addressing the main weakness of security
The power supply is the other ‘Achilles’ heel’ of security systems. Our tamper alert devices enable low energy consumption: connected movement detectors can run on batteries for up to 10 years.”
Taking OBD out of the workshop
For many years now, vehicles around the world come with an on-board diagnostics (OBD) port, which is typically connected to a dealership diagnostics computer when the vehicle is taken to a dealership for a service, allowing for a mechanic to access your vehicles onboard systems to view and identify faults.
All vehicles built after 2003, have an OBD 2.0 port, which gives the user access to critical driver behaviour data such as vehicle speed, engine RPM, accelerator pedal position, engine load, accelerator data, distance travelled and alert indicators such as low fuel, flat tyre, etc.
While such functionality is already being used by some insurers, these features can also be helpful in improved asset management by fleet managers, rental companies, motor vehicle dealers, asset financiers and more. For logistics, information can be collected regarding deliveries, including tracking of pallets, parcels, and trolleys, improving value chain security and improving efficiencies.
Du Toit believes that the rental market can be disrupted based on driver behaviour. Imagine having the ability to classify driving behaviour and being charged a rate that is applicable to the way you drove throughout the rental period. There are lots of people that are willing to pay a premium while others will want the benefit of a saving for “driving like Miss Daisy”.
Paying a daily insurance rate versus a monthly rate due to good, healthy driver habits is another area open for disruption. Drivers are also able to benefit from an enhanced user service experience by proactively dealing with alerts or warnings picked up the OBD.
Consider a new unfortunate common practice whereby rental drivers in need of new tyres swop rental car tyres out with their old ones and return the rentals with the used tyres. Once again, IoT is able to disrupt theft and similar activities by placing a device on the tyre which is able to detect movement and bank angles on the tyres, thereby providing an alert that the tyres have been tampered with.
Enabling the connected farmer
Aimed at small, medium and large-scale farmers, Vox uses IoT to help with animal management, reproductive control, fattening management, and in heat and calving detection. The smart collars used have multiple sensors, are lightweight and easy to use, and improve on previous solutions with network coverage and extended battery life.
In this scenario, each animal is fitted with a IoT collar to monitor its location and condition, with the data being transmitted securely to the Vox cloud, and resulting analytics collected, interpreted and delivered back to web portals or smartphone applications. This allows farmers to set geofencing boundaries, monitor and track their animals and get real-time notifications for theft and other behavioural events.
On the back end, all information collected is securely sent to a multi-platform system in the cloud, which analyses data and displays it in a user-friendly application that allows farmers to set geofencing boundaries, monitor and track their animals and get real-time notifications for theft and other abnormal events.
Think of it as an IoT eco-system which extends to security, humidity and moisture as well as tracking. Collectively, this provides farmers with a comprehensive management tool to increase productivity, reduce costs and animal losses, and improve operations efficiency by cutting down on the paperwork.
Vox Fibre undergoes refresh – drives value to customers
Vox has refreshed and is relaunching its Vox Fibre product suite, aiming to deliver additional value for customers and partners in a market that is characterised by price for ISP services.
Henda Edwardes, Executive Head: Carrier & Communication Solutions at Vox, says “The market is highly competitive and we are constantly looking for ways to differentiate our products and services, beyond just price. We believe that this approach has enabled us to overcome a number of customer pain points when it comes to connectivity and internet-enabled services.”
The company, which has a number of bundles and packages, has substantially expanded its national footprint. Vox has also prioritised its Broadband Business Fibre as its first enhanced offering – which boasts symmetric, capped and uncapped high-speed broadband internet, a best-effort service with low contention ratios, with price points that start from R2 499 for capped and uncapped services per month. Links range from 20Mbps to 1Gbs and fibre bundles from 50Mbps and above include value added voice services. Vox therefore has the lowest cost-to-value in the market.
In line with the relaunch, Vox has done away with in-and-out of precinct pricing, as well as out of precinct commencing at 50MB. Customers now have access to packages commencing at 20MB.
Pricing, combined with access to the Vox Customer Zone, allows customers to manage their end-to-end Vox services and solutions, and increase their capacity up to 1Gbps, through the instantaneous installation of a 1Gbps endpoint on site.
“Vox will continually identify ways in which to drive value for our customers, so improvements and enhancements across our connectivity portfolio can be expected as 2018 progresses,” adds Edwardes.
According to Vox CEO, Jacques du Toit, the company should no longer be seen as just an ISP, but rather a fully-fledged infrastructure provider through its acquisition of Frogfoot Networks in 2015.
“The launch of the National Long Distance Fibre Project in 2016 is one way in which we are working to ensure that towns and cities outside of major metropolitan areas are getting access to high speed fibre, and wireless connectivity,” adds du Toit.
“This is also a great opportunity for the smaller retail players to be introduced to the benefits of Vox fibre in malls, where Frogfoot has been deployed (prices start at R595).”
Rollout of these services is available in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, East London and Bloemfontein, and is currently underway along the eastern belt of the country, extending from Witbank through Middelburg, Secunda, Ermelo, Piet Retief, Paulpietersburg; Melmoth, Empangeni, Richards Bay and Ballito.
