By: Alvaro Sanchez, CEO – Integrasys
Over the past five years, due to communications, social media and the ability to travel, the globalisation has reached its highest with all the pros and cons that may come with it. Currently we are facing a devastating threat called Coronavirus or COVID-19 in a weak highly globalized world. The COVID-19 health problem has affected severely almost every single country in the world with a numerous infected citizens and deaths, almost 119,690 people in the world have died from COVID-19, however, that is the official number, but we all know there are many more victims as most of Governments have not tested all the population or have provided accurate data on the deaths within country.
Both Spain and the USA, two countries with our strongest commercial representation, have been affected the most. Spain, my home country has been already on a 45-day lock-down and this economic slowdown brings new challenges for Spanish citizens as well as the companies.
Due to this virus, the Spanish Government has forced all companies and businesses to close down or work remotely. In Integrasys we have decided to work remotely with all the areas within the company is functioning in its full capacity without interrupting any customer commitment or needs.
Currently, Spanish Government is managing part of every communication provider within the country such as Telefonica, Orange and Vodafone as communications is one of the basic services everybody must have in this pandemic, setting their policies and controlling the prices, as the demand is greater than ever.
We have implemented all the suggested measures as soon as we came back from Satellite show that took place in March 2020, therefore, up to date and to my knowledge no employee of Integrasys has been tested positive to COVID-19. Integrasys is a great company thanks to our people and we believe that the most critical task is to take care of our team in this exceptional time and continue to be productive for our customers success.
As most of the companies are working remotely it is clear that the automation is crucial and so far, we have seen an important uptake into our automation solutions for News Gathering and Carrier Monitoring. During these difficult times and as an exceptional gesture we have been offering to our clients automated systems free of charge to use during COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, as our engineers are not able to travel, we are offering to all our customers with already purchased systems or solutions that are to be purchased, a free of charge remote installation services.
This threat has driven us to innovate, we have accomplished another initiative to avoid difficult and slow logistics processes, as we have virtualized all our systems for our customers, now they can run in a customer computer on a VMware, so it is very easily loadable and expandable remotely.
We believe that social distancing tendency is here to stay at least for the foreseeable future, therefore, we are already developing products to meet these new needs which require more automated and unmanned operations ensuring safer workplace environment for the companies.
Speaking about the industry in general, satellite communication will continue to be there to support data transmissions that will continue to be crucial to connect people and keep the world rolling, therefore, we foresee a drop in markets for a particular business application (such as OneWeb); but GEO applications will demand more bandwidth, such as consumer. Due to lock-down, everyone at home is always connected to the Internet, for example, Netflix has ended 4K transmission in Spain as the bandwidth demand was so high that the networks were not able to serve every customer. Netflix, Zoom, Whatsapp, HBO, Skype, are the most used application in this quarantine by the Spanish population and all require high bandwidth.
Due to the importance of health and the difficult times we live today; we will see many projects in the coming years related to automated disease prevention and automation in health system. This kind of automation require IT and communication companies to work together, so we expect an important uptake in this kind of projects.
Health is the most important thing in life, now that the people feel vulnerable, they appreciate more and more to be healthy and safe, I am extremely glad that all within the company are all safe and healthy, and as soon as this Pandemic is over and we will be back to the office stronger than ever.
In the coming months we will see a social change, with more fear, and worries from outsiders, therefore we will see our local offices more and more relevant. We now serve USA from Washington DC office, and Asia from Jakarta office; however, we have been thinking for very long time to set up a new Middle East office and perhaps now is the right time, so we will see if 2020 will be the year for this exciting expansion.
