Globally ranked, poised to make TT J international ICT hotspot

The company, which D’Oliveira describes as a “carriers’ carrier”, with clients such as AT&T, Verizon, Digicel and TSTT, boasts of a culture where “permission to fail is part of the corporate DNA”.

“What this means,” said D’Oliveira, is that our people are encouraged to transform the customer experience. They may get it wrong sometimes, but you learn from these mistakes. We look for ways to celebrate when our people get it right and encourage them to try new things. While our competitors are in analysis or paralysis mode, we are always trying new things, fixing it and then moving on. It allows us to keep three, four, five steps in front of the competition.” One step CW Business has taken is toward becoming the largest exporter of ICT managed services in the country and possibly, throughout the region.

Over the past couple months, D’Oliveira said, the company has been moving its network and security operating centres from Columbia to Trinidad.

“Initially, we took the decision to move these facilities to Trinidad to serve the English speaking countries,” he told Business Day, “With the Liberty acquisition and the merger though, we are looking to expand those services to English speaking countries in Europe.” D’Oliveira said the result will be high end jobs for nationals, increased foreign exchange generation through ICT and a reduction in the dependence on oil and gas.

But what are ICT managed services? D’Oliveira explained that unlike a traditional IT department that had to be staffed, equipped and managed by a company, these functions are outsourced under managed ICT model.

“In our model, we own the infrastructure for the hardware and the software. We implement it. We give you everything you need to operate it and we manage it on your behalf. Instead of having to pay upfront fees and capital to acquire IT, we fully had to fund the entire investment and charge the customer a monthly fee for the service. As your needs increase, the costs increase, as your needs decrease, the cost goes down.” The CW vice president said the service could be customised to fit the needs of small, medium or large businesses.

Beyond managed ICT services, D’Oliveira said the company had one of the broadest solutions portfolios throughout the region, covering traditional unified communications such as PBX, video conferencing, messaging collaboration and IT security, connectivity, managed network and digital content distribution solutions.

D’Oliveira elaborated on this: “This is providing information to specific locations at specific points in time, also known as narrowcasting. I may have one site that needs specific information ‘pushed’ or sent at two o’clock. I can push through that information to the end user who needs it.” The benefit here was being able to give a group of identified users the info rather than mass distribute it.

In addition to the strength of its corporate culture, CW Business’ financial strength is one of its key assets said D’Oliveira, more so with the presence of Liberty Global. He told Business Day that the parent company’s plan was to keep investing in CW ‘s managed services business.

“T hat continued investment in our infrastructure and our people I think is critical,” he said. “With us, it is about long term investment, whatever we invest in now is for the next 10 to 20 years, which is really healthy for the business at the end of the day.” D’Oliveira said the success of CW’s approach is shown by recognition from leading industry analysts. He said CW has received accolades from Gartner, Frost and Sullivan, IBC Reports and Transparency Research.

“Gartner, which is the most noteworthy.” said D’Oliveira, “acknowledged that CW is in the top five disaster recovery managed IT services globally. Not regionally. Not in Trinidad.” Meanwhile, Frost and Sullivan named CW ‘Company of the Year’ in 2015.

“Gartner looked at the top 100 companies. There was no TSTT. There was no Digicel. There was no Fujitsu. None of these were evaluated. We came in the top five.” “That to me, is a testament to the deep portfolio that we built, the people around that portfolio, the processes we’ve put in.

And we’ve been recognised.” he said.