Partnership between Tait and UC announced Supreme Winner at the 2014 KiwiNet Research Commercialisation Awards
Christchurch, 13 June 2014, - Tait Communications’ and the University of Canterbury’s (UC) Wireless Network Partnership
has been named winner of the BNZ Supreme Award at the 2014 KiwiNet Research Commercialisation awards ceremony held in
Auckland on Wednesday night.
Tait and UC also took home the Minter Ellison Rudd Watts Research and Business Partnership Award, which recognizes the
relationship between a research organisation and business that delivers significant commercial value for New Zealand.
Tait’s Chief Marketing Officer, James Kyd, accepted the award on behalf of Tait alongside the University of
Canterbury’s, Fred Samandari.
Mr Kyd said: “Our partnership with UC and the Wireless Research Centre (WRC) has yielded significant commercial results
for Tait across many solutions we are selling today. The partnership includes outstanding work enhancing the performance
of Long-term Evolution (LTE or 4G) broadband to support the highly demanding application needs of our global public
safety, utility and extractive industry clients.”
Mr Kyd adds: “We are currently implementing our first LTE commercial trial and we’re positive that it will open up new
export markets for Tait and put us ahead of our competition in what we can deliver.”
Tait’s Chief Technology Officer, Trevor Laughton, was instrumental in formalizing the company’s relationship with UC
with the establishment of the WRC in 2007.
Mr Laughton says that investment in research and development has always been central to Tait’s ethos and that
collaboration with UC delivers better research results for the company.
“Our collaborative R efforts with UC deliver more innovative results than we could achieve on our own. Our close connection with the
University also helps us to develop skills and interest in wireless communication ensuring the future of the industry
remains strong in New Zealand.”
Mr Laughton adds, “We provide guidance and oversight to WRC about what’s important to our clients but at the same time
WRC researchers have freedom to pursue the projects that inspire them.”
The Tait Foundation, the charitable trust set up by the company’s founder, Sir Angus Tait, has donated $2.2 million in
cash and committed additional funding of around $500,000 a year for the next two years to the WRC.
Tait Communications invests around 12% of revenue, above and beyond the WRC funding, into research and development.
Tait is a New Zealand-owned exporting success story in an intensely competitive global industry with annual turnover in
excess of US$170M.
About Tait Communications
Our clients protect communities, power cities, move citizens, harness resources and save lives all over the world. We
work with them to create and support the critical communication solutions they depend on to do their jobs.
Digital wireless communication forms the central nervous system of everything we do. Around this resilient, robust core
we design, develop, manufacture, test, deploy, support and manage innovative communication environments for
organisations that have to put their total trust in the systems and people they work with.
We’ve worked hard to develop genuine insight into our clients’ worlds, and have pursued engineering, operational and
services excellence for more than 40 years. This understanding, and our belief in championing open-standards technology,
means we can give our clients the best possible choice and value to achieve the human outcomes they’re driven by. We’re
not simply aligned with our clients, we’re devoted to their cause.
For further information, please visit www.taitradio.com
ENDS