ISat Retail Connect (Continued)
Benefits
- Always-on availability - Unlike terrestrial infrastructure, which is notorious for its lack of reliability in the more remote regions of the country and continent, ISat RetailConnect offers 24/7 availability, a critical factor for retail operations that require both frequent real-time transaction authorisations during trading hours and transmission of bulk batch data after hours.
- Elimination of bandwidth wastage - Because satellite bandwidth is effectively pooled in the sky, it becomes unnecessary for individual branches to have their own dedicated ‘pipe’, which is often under utilised and wasted. By sharing bandwidth, usage of the organisation’s network can be economically designed to handle traffic optimally. Head Office can also have real-time access to sales data at any time, extremely useful for all important inventory control.
- Economies of scale - As the organisation expands its branch or store network and its geographical reach, ISat RetailConnect becomes more and more cost efficient as total bandwidth costs are shared over an increased number of cost centres.
- Improved supply chain management - With ISat RetailConnect users become an integral part of InfoConnect, IS’ online business community comprised of thousands of leading companies including leading financial institutions, credit vetting organisations and trading partners. Being part of this community will result in significant improvement in the management of their supply chains.
- Faster card authorisation - means quicker till turnover Petrol card and credit card purchases travel directly via satellite to a transaction switch for authorisation, significantly reducing typical transaction time from 17 seconds over a dial-up link to 4 seconds and resulting in a direct reduction in customer time at the paypoint.
Features
- Real-time network monitoring
- Bandwidth usage graphing
- Centralised management of applications
- IS Fax services
- EFT switching
- Credit vetting through ITC
- IP multicasting
- Video broadcasting
- Business Television Network
- Comprehensive SLAs