iPLATO among top contenders for the Broadband Britain Challenge

Today iPLATO has been short listed for the London Finals of the Broadband Britain Challenge due to be held on August 13th in The Music Room in Mayfair. Prize winners of the London Finals will automatically be entered for the nationwide final on September 12th.

Broadband Britain Challenge is a nationwide search to find Britain's brightest ADSL broadband users ­ people who have bettered their lives or the lives of others through the use of ADSL broadband technology at work, at home, in education or anywhere else. Through its virtual team set-up, which allows the companys employees to work from any location at the time they desire, iPLATO is an extensive user of broadband technology on all three continents of presence.

After being made aware of the competition by a business relationship, iPLATO entered the Broadband Britain Challenge on the 19th of June. Due to the nature of the organisation broadband has always been an obvious if not indispensable choice for iPLATO. With our headquarters based in London, a Solution Development Centre in Prague (Czech Republic) and a commercial franchise in San Francisco (United States) we use the Internet to support our daily operations and with the amount of information and data being exchanged every day broadband technology is an important condition for iPLATOs success.

The projects iPLATO works on are managed on an Internet based project portal, which contains all essential information from contact details to project plans and deliverables to chat rooms and FAQs. Working in this manner has allowed the company to decrease project delivery costs by 50 - 60%, it has increased speed of project delivery with an estimated 25% and it has drastically improved employee and customer satisfaction.

Tobias Alpsten, Managing Director of iPLATO: Being a broadband enabled provider of enterprise technology solutions we do not even travel to install or test developed solutions. Via the Internet we replicate our clients technology architecture onto servers in the Solution Development Centre in Prague where the application development takes place. Upon implementation, we simply move our developed code in the opposite direction, back to the clients site. Rather than focusing project control and issue resolution in our meetings throughout the project, we emphasise on knowledge sharing and training."

Especially with the current acceleration of wireless broadband access, companies such as iPLATO can exploit their swift international organisation. Arjen Soetekouw, Commercial Director for iPLATO: In fact, clients often don't know whether we're working from home, the office, a client site or even from a coffee shop."

iPLATO is very excited about contributing in this manner to the development of Britain as a broadband nation and hope to be among the prize winners of the London Finals in a few weeks time.