BCBusiness

B . C . T E C H N O L O G Y S p e c i a l F e a t u r e stored in the States," says Krohn. As technoloœy choices multiply, many companies are questioning where their future lies. Most are storing their major IT infrastructure on-site and are now facing a myriad of competing ideas of where to move it. The question regarding what should be sitting on premise or moved to the cloud is what hybrid IT companies like Long View specialize in. "Is it Long View's own cloud, is it Microsoft Azure or is it Amazon web services, for example? There are a multitude of oerings and Long View has the depth to help evaluate the alternatives with customers and then build a road map for them," says Shawn Ambrose, director of sales at Long View. Nature's Path is an independent, family-run, organic food company located in Richmond, B.C. that has been through this evaluation process.¤In their journey to continue growing with the right IT service, they worked with Long View to understand what type of infrastructure would make sense for their particular business needs. ¤While they could have chosen a number of options, Long View helped them shift towards a consumption-based model in the cloud that allows Nature's Path to only pay for the storage and bandwidth they actively use.¤"We work as their strategic IT partner and allow them to focus on their business, which is making delicious, organic food in a sustainable way," says Ambrose. The Inside Track In December of last year, TELUS launched Canada's šrst Internet of Things (IoT) marketplace with the goal of providing turnkey IoT solutions for businesses. And while that may seem quite complex, it is an important step that is already starting to bring a competitive advantage to multiple industries in B.C. "IoT is part solution, part data and partly the interaction of people. When you combine all of those things together, you can generate a successful outcome for businesses and their customers," says Shawn Sanderson, TELUS' vice president of Internet of Things. The Internet of Things space, in its simplest form, uses connected devices to help businesses gain valuable information that can be used to decrease costs, increase revenue and better understand employee and consumer behaviour. Moreover, IoT allows businesses to monitor resources and simplify many processes that are currently manual. For retail, using IoT can really help companies understand everything from where customers are spending the most of amount of time in their stores to how they are engaging with their products to what might be the cause of increased or decreased sales. One of TELUS' IoT partners had exactly this experience: a major retailer could not understand why it was getting a 20 per cent increase in sales of one of their particular products on specišc days. After implementing an IoT solution, it discovered that it was because of changes in weather patterns. If it was raining or humid outside, sales would shift, and if it suddenly got colder, it would see increases in customer tra„c. The ability to use technoloœy to help with sales forecasting can truly be instrumental to the growth in ones business and it is for this reason, that organizations like TELUS have decided to bring turnkey IoT solutions into the Canadian marketplace. "We're looking at understanding what the challenges are [that companies face] and building towards an improved outcome. We want to take the focus away from the complexities of technoloœy, making it a more real and understandable experience for the customer," says Sanderson. "We're looking at under- standing what the chal- lenges are [that companies face] and building towards an improved outcome. We want to take the focus away from the complexities of technoloœy, making it a more real and understand- able experience..." — Shawn Sanderson, TELUS B.C.'s tech leaders are giving local businesses a leg up on the competition

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