- ContributedPeter Gillette (right), chairman of the Trinidad-based Gillette Group of Companies, in discussion with Brian Goldson, a director of Computers & Controls (Jamaica) Limited (formerly InfoGrace) at the company's recent launch in Kingston.
TRINIDAD & TOBAGO'S Gillette Group is expanding its interests in Jamaica with its flagship brand Computers and Controls (formerly InfoGrace) but already its chairman Peter Gillette is hinting at further developments in the pipeline.
The launch of Computers and Controls took place in St. Andrew on July 20 and at the same event, Mr. Gillette spoke of the possibility of locating two offshore call centres in Jamaica soon.
According to Mr. Gillette, the most recent new company to be launched by the Group was DirecOne, an offshore call centre catering entirely to Fortune 500 customers in the United States . DirecOne recently employed 700 persons to work in this company, which will begin operations during the first week of August.
Installed in this facility is a state-of-the-art predictive dialer connected to 24 T1 circuits (or 576 telephone lines) supplied by AT&T in their facility in Florida. This switch is capable of blending both outbound and inbound traffic. More importantly it is Web-enabled and provides a platform that connects DirecOne agents to Web pages all over the world.
"This is only the beginning since we currently have in hand enough business to build six more of these centres and we are seriously looking at locating at least two of them here in Jamaica," Mr. Gillette said.
As he traced the development of his group of companies, he explained that, "We wrote customized applications and implemented them with professional service and training. At the centre of all that we did was the customer.
"Every day then, as is the case now, we asked ourselves the question, 'what is it that we can do for our customers that will improve the way they do business or make their lives easier and more convenient?' It was the answer to these questions that has over the years, given rise to the now 20 companies located in five countries that form the Gillette Group."
Some 12 years ago, Gillette started to see the important relationship between telecommunications and computing when they approached Northern Telecom now Nortel to be their distributor. They entered and pioneered the Cable TV market some nine years ago and the Internet with the launching of their first ISP Cablenett, which led subsequently to the acquisition of their two largest competitors at the time.
"In Trinidad we now control better than 80 per cent of all the independent ISP business and approximately 40 per cent of the entire market," said Mr. Gillette. "The Internet today has over 200 million users and is projected to climb to over a billion users in the next five years. In Latin America and the Caribbean alone, the growth rate is in excess of 100 per cent. In Trinidad we have commenced a pilot project delivering Internet and other data services over our newly upgraded Two-way Fibre optic Cable infrastructure. Soon we can expect in that market to see our 75 thousand customers able to Telecommute and access the Internet at blistering speeds."
The Gillette Group launched a new wireless initiative that will offer fixed broadband communications as an alternative or backup to wired offerings. Through Open Telecom in Trinidad and Comtech in Jamaica, users can receive electronic messages either in Trinidad, Jamaica, the U.S. or Canada on a common paging device. "I can confidently say that there is no other company in the world that can offer a similar service," he asserted.
With one billion wireless phones projected to be in use worldwide in the next five years Gillette awaits the outcome of a cellular application in Trinidad. According to Mr. Gillettte, "Wireless devices like pagers, PDAs and cell phones will be the platforms from which a myriad of consumer to business transactions will be conducted in the future. The paradigm of going to our computers to "pull" information is being transformed into one where information will conveniently be "pushed" or "pulled" to us wherever we are. The IT transactions of the future will originate on many of these devices."
Gillette's media interests have in three short years risen to the number one position in a broadcast Radio market that is highly competitive with 14 stations on the air. "As new media emerge and we see the proliferation of second generation portals, we are confident that our media assets will be of major strategic importance and will one day converge with our Internet interests," the chairman said.
