INNOVATORS Gold Award - New Orleans City Business

INNOVATOR
CommTech Industries
Key innovation: SMB 4.0 system, which offers information
technology planning and management, project management,
and ongoing technical support as well as troubleshooting
Biggest clients: the public sector as well as the hospitality
and health care industries
Where they’re based: New Orleans
Top executive: Darryl d’Aquin, president and founder
Year introduced: 1991
FOR MORE THAN 15 years, CommTech Industries has
been integrating communications systems for the public sector
and the health care and hospitality industries — large
entities requiring extensive support.
But in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Darryl
d’Aquin, CommTech president and founder, realized
smaller businesses were in need of the same kind of systems
integration — although they usually didn’t have it.
“We had actually been thinking about something like
this before, but Katrina was the catalyst for us to expedite
this particular offering,” d’Aquin said. “It just became so
obvious to us in the weeks after the storm that a business
did not have to be a big company in order to be in need
of advanced IT planning.”
In response, CommTech has launched an ambitious new
service geared especially to small and medium businesses
called SMB 4.0.
“It really addresses a need that no one has addressed
before,” said Dan Henderson, CommTech director of marketing.
“Before it was just assumed that only the biggest
companies would want and use something like this. Now we
are finding that just the opposite is the case — businesses of
any size can very much use this sort of a service.”
Providing routine IT operations, SMB 4.0 also offers
information technology planning and management, project
management, and ongoing technical support as well
as troubleshooting.
“It is a full package, the kind that would be offered to larger
businesses, only in this case as a packaged service, which
makes it affordable to smaller companies,” Henderson said.
And the emphasis remains on reliability.
“We wanted to put together a service that has all of the regular
ongoing operations of any system but is still able to deal
with a variety of projects as well as the unintended incidences
and failures and things that break,” d’Aquin said. “And coming
up with a four-point plan that was also cost-effective for a
smaller business was what allowed us to do all of that.”
Henderson points out that because the SMB 4.0 is a new
product, it is being used by only a handful of clients.
“But there is no doubt in our mind that this is going to
take off, and very soon,” he said.•
— Garry Boulard
PHOTO BY TRACIE MORRIS SCHAEFER
CommTech Industries President Darryl d’Aquinn, center, reviews procedures with business development director Dan Henderson, left, and director of product solutions Charles Smith.
14A 2008 Innovator of the Year