Melita recently supported the Malta eBusiness seminar organised by CSB Group in collaboration with the Malta Institute of Management. Business of all sizes in all sectors are using the Internet  in many different ways - to work with partners and suppliers, for procurement, for internal activities such as knowledge sharing, a new sales channel and new  product development, and much more.  The aim of the seminar, entitled “Ecommerce – The way forward, Opportunities and Implications”, was to explore the benefits and challenges of ebusiness.

Addressing the seminar on behalf of Melita Business, Corporate Services Manager Antoine Sciberras commented that a good starting point for those seeking to move their business online is to understand that an online business runs on principles very similar to the traditional bricks-and-mortar retail business. “First and foremost you want to make sure that your ‘shop’ is as close as possible to your customers. A business owner also wants to ensure that his outlets can handle the traffic, especially when very busy, without affecting the customer experience.”

During his presentation, Ing. Sciberras guided the audience through the basic steps that a business goes through when moving or expanding to the online world. He stressed the importance of ensuring that business owners should not look only at the aesthetics but also the infrastructure used to ensure that customers can access information quickly and in a safe way. “When taking your business online it is important to choose a hosting provider – which would be referred to as a data centre, or co-location service, that ideally stands as close to your client base as possible. If you’re operating in Malta, your clients will have a better experience if the website is hosted locally. The provider you choose should also be robust and large enough to handle your traffic – online visitors don’t have the patience to wait for minutes until your page loads. Everything needs to happen in less than seconds.”

Melita has a dedicated business support team catering for businesses, ranging from self-employed to large international organisations. Apart from standard telecommunications services, Melita Business also offer co-location, dedicated point-to-point connectivity as well as international IP connectivity. Melita is the only operator in Malta to be connected to a Tier 1 Internet operator directly in Milan hence ensuring optimum connectivity to the rest of the world.