We’re not telling you anything you don’t already know when we say staying ahead in business can be challenging at the best of times. However innovation, be it in product design, processes and back end business infrastructure can not only ease the pain but actually transform your business to be able to compete more effectively against global competitors.

Changes to your telecom infrastructure can bring you instant gains by helping you work the way you want to, respond to customers and suppliers faster and control your costs.

So what can you do? Well… quite a lot actually. We’ve pulled together five tips to solve key business challenges – competing successfully against global competitors, communicating more effectively with customers and suppliers and trimming non-essential communication costs.

Smart working with smart devices

You’re never going to avoid travelling to trade shows or visiting suppliers abroad - its part and parcel of what you do. What you can do is exploit the opportunities devices such smartphones and tablets give you when working away from the office.

A word of warning though. The smarter the device the more inclined your staff will be to want access to confidential emails, files and reports. That’s great when you’re sitting at home, not so great when you leave the device in the back of a taxi half way across the world.

What you can do:

Tip 1: Mobile Device Management can help you secure access to corporate data and easily manage your mobile fleet. You’ll also be able to deploy apps to all devices from a centralised point and wipe their content if ever they’re lost or stolen.

Get the plumbing right then build, build, build

You’re probably tired of people telling you it’s a digital age, if you’re not “It’s a digital age”! IP networks offer reliable business communications and are a real money saver.

Investing in the right kind of telecoms ‘plumbing’ now will set you in good stead for upcoming innovations. You can also significantly improve your customer service by connecting internal systems such as CRM to your communications platform.

What you can do:

Tip 2: Take a look at what you do now, skip the consultants and run an internal ‘Blue Sky’ session to think about how you’d like to work. You may find that there’s a telecoms service already out there that may help. Products like SIP trunking are a great foundation for future proofing your communications.

To me, to you...

The effects of missing a call for an order can range from mildly annoying all the way through to disastrous. There can be a number of reasons, but being stuck with a prehistoric telephone system that’s failing to keep you connected is definitely one of them.

What you can do:

Tip 3: If you’re out of the office regularly ‘Twin’ your desk phone to your mobile. Both will ring at the same time and can be answered by you if you’re out, or a colleague in the office.

What’s more, newer phone systems can email you missed call details and voicemails. If you have a smartphone you can pick these up on the move.

Let’s get ready to un-bundle

Telecom bundles are like gym memberships, they seem like a good idea at the beginning but you could end up paying for a service you don’t really use. For example if you signed up to a tariff at the peak of an overseas project or sales push, you might not be using your international allowance but you will still be paying for it.

What you can do:

Tip 4: Do an audit of the minutes and data your staff use on their mobiles and landlines. If you can, go back six to twelve months and see what your usage as a business really is. And don’t get stuck on a consumer tariffs for mobiles, it’s better to get a business tariff giving you shared minutes, data and free in-group calls so usage allowance is never wasted as everyone uses the same pot.

Knowledge is power

As with most areas of your organisation, the demands on IT and telecommunication budgets are never ending. There are constant calls for streamlining and cost efficiencies, but at the same time the business wants greater flexibility, faster connectivity and the latest technology to improve productivity.

What you can do

Tip 5: As the title says ‘knowledge is power’. Unless you’re an Excel whizz and enjoy looking through rows of call data, we recommend signing up to your provider’s online billing service. A good platform should make it easy to drill down into historical data and help you monitor and manage your spend.

Want even more telecom tips?

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B2B shouldn't mean 'personality-free' and so we wanted our corporate video to reflect this. Watch the video to see what we do and how we can give your business heroic customer support.

Ofcom have announced the winners in the 4G mobile spectrum auction.

After more than 50 rounds of bidding, Vodafone Ltd, Telefónica UK Ltd, Everything Everywhere Ltd, Hutchison 3G UK Ltd and Niche Spectrum Ventures Ltd (a subsidiary of BT Group plc) have all won spectrum. This is suitable for rolling out new superfast mobile broadband services to consumers and to small and large businesses across the UK.

So what does this mean for you?

Telefonica UK (O2) and Vodafone UK have already begun their joint project to share network infrastructure providing a more robust GSM and 3G service providing 98% population coverage for voice and data for 2015.

Obtaining a license from the Ofcom auction was the next step. The infrastructure improvements have been designed as a platform for 4G. Vodafone and O2 can start rolling out 4G services to consumers which is expected in spring or early summer 2013.

Obviously this will be great news if your handset is 4G but will also benefit other smartphone or tablet users.  4G is not necessarily the Kevin Bacon experience of downloading entire movies whilst on a park bench but more the intention is to provide the brunt of the data services. This alleviates the burden on the presently taxed 2G and 3G networks which will improve our general speeds all round and ensure better GSM voice service (results in less dropped calls).

A further stage of the auction will be the assignment of specific locations for the spectrum wins. UK networks will be jostling to make the lower bandwidths in urban areas are used for better in-building coverage whilst relying on the 2.6 GHz spectrum to provide the greater general area coverage.

View the full Ofcom story here.

Over the last few weeks the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet has been getting some pretty good reviews. Therefore I thought I'd share my owns thoughts with you in the video.

The first thing to note (no pun intended) is that the 10.1 differs from the Tab 2 I recently reviewed is that it includes the new Samsung S Pen which delivers a better user experience. This is particularly the case if you use the multitasking feature which allows you to view applications side by side and easily switch between multiple screens. I was also impressed by the office suite which comes out of the box. It's intuitive, fast and has obviously been well thought out.

Watch my short video for a full review of the pen, multitasking and office suite features.