All The Eggs In One Basket

June 19, 2001

The synergy of three companies working as a team creates better web-based sales channels for other businesses.

"Incredible delivery. Ultimate in service and support. The teamwork has just been amazing. Better than terrific." Catherine Clarke Luckhurst can't seem to stop enthusing about what TELUS and their recommendation of the HP VeriFone system has done for her firm, Strategic Profits Inc. (SPI) as the three firms implement a new transaction processing relationship to help other businesses.

The people of TELUS are equally thrilled with what this new teamwork brings to many other TELUS customers. Now any business that wants the web to become a truly viable, reliable sales channel, benefits from the synergy of all the components working together seamlessly.

The story really begins on two fronts - with TELUS wanting to integrate transaction processing into its own e-business offerings, and with Strategic Profits who were struggling through some poor hosting choices in the past.

As Luckhurst puts it: "too much downtime is any downtime. Depending on providers we were down once a week, or twice a month, even had plugs pulled on the servers." She had concerns about security as well as reliability.

At the same time, TELUS had determined that one of the pieces of the puzzle was from Hewlett-Packard Canada - the HP VeriFone Payworks system for real time transaction processing. It's an adaptable, versatile way for merchants to authorize and capture transactions, provide credits or refunds, make adjustments or void sales. It provides real-time status updates, delivers fraud protection, data integrity, and multiple security levels using the latest cryptographic techniques.

The result: a synergy of three companies. HP provides the proven transaction processing infrastructure, TELUS hosts the service at their Intelligent Internet Data Centre (see story, back cover), and SPI manages customer marketing and implementation. For SPI this represented a strategic alliance with two much larger companies.

"To be a global player you have to move to this level," says Luckhurst who explains that this was not a decision made solely for themselves. "We work for everyone from micro businesses to large institutions, both commercial operations and not-for-profit ventures. We are responsible for all these client companies and we take our mandate seriously. There is not only the comfort of big brands (HP and TELUS) but also the delivery behind it."

For Strategic Profits the deliverables included both reliability and security.

"All due diligence pointed to TELUS," Luckhurst explained. "Security was a big factor and I was very pleased with physical and online security, the firewalls and alarm procedures. I had my key technical officer tour the TELUS Intelligent Internet Data Centre in Calgary and he was blown away. "She cites system redundancy and the commitment to 99.999% up time. "Since Feb 1 we haven't had any downtime. We are able to sleep at night. It's thrilling for me, a really nice change. We strive for the ultimate best and we have that now."

When asked what advice would she give to other companies looking for secure servers and 24x7 reliability, Catherine Clarke Luckhurst is as enthusiastic as always: "They have to come to TELUS, To compete and be profitable you need to look at TELUS. That's where companies should be - even where our competitors should be."

For more information about e-business solutions and co-located hosting from TELUS, please contact: in BC and Alberta call 310-DATA (3282) and throughout the rest of North America call 1-866-799-7777.