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