Brisbane-based Accelerated Concepts has appointed Melbourne’s NPS (Network Professional Services) as a master reseller to speed up sales of its Australian-designed 4G failover routers.

Designed by an engineering team based in Brisbane, Accelerated routers use an embedded, carrier-certified cellular modem to provide Internet access via 4G LTE and 3G cellular wireless data networks when primary access fails. The devices are sold globally by US-based Accelerated Concepts Inc.

With a long background in routing products, Richmond-based NPS employs network engineers with experience from SME to enterprise service and sales staff familiar with channel sales in Australia and New Zealand. NPS already partners with Centrify, CrowdStrike and Intel.

NPS is also a member of the Apple Consultants Network with expertise in LAN / WAN deployment, Active Directory and UNIX / Linux operating systems. NPS is ideally placed to assist in the deployment of Accelerated Concepts 4G LTE solutions, whether as a standalone installation in a retail store or with 4G LTE bandwidth for enterprise networks.

Accelerated Concepts Pty Ltd Managing Director Matt Ramsay said NPS would address the large opportunity for the company’s products in Australia and New Zealand. “Our team in Brisbane is basically the engineering arm for Accelerated Concepts globally,” he said.

“Accelerated Australia is 100 per cent focused on building a quality product that is tailored for the Australian, US and global markets. Our engineering team designs all the firmware, software, hardware and packaging for Accelerated products, manages their purchasing and manufacturing and is responsible for gaining appropriate certifications for both our domestic market and abroad.

“Rather than build a local internal sales team, we’ve decided to deliver our products in the ANZ market through a partner. David Malcolm and his team at NPS have the technical skills and sales experience to quickly understand our products and how they will work in the local market.

“David’s focus is relentless, so I know he will grab this bull by the horns and wrestle it into the dirt.”

NPS Executive Director David Malcolm said Accelerated’s 4G failover routers offered tremendous value for both resellers and customers. “Accelerated provides a fast alternative to keep businesses running when the broadband breaks down on Australia's ageing copper infrastructure,” he said.

“Capable of speeds as fast as 300 megabits per second, the Accelerated 6350 router can give the NBN a run for its money without having to roll out expensive infrastructure or wait for months or years.

“We believe this is a cost-effective investment in failsafe operation for organisations that demand reliable Internet connectivity, from point of sale support for retailers and popup shops to medical practices needing fast, high capacity Internet access.

“We’re seeking resellers such as vertical software solutions providers, system integrators, communications companies and telcos that support clients in industries as diverse as fast food, retail, infrastructure and automotive sales and service.

“Accelerated offers advanced products that are highly configurable and easily deployable when compared to other products. And they’re available at a great price.” For more information about Accelerated products in Australia, visit www.acau.com.au

Organisers, Exhibitions and Trade Fairs, have opened registrations for the free to attend AUSPACK 2017, taking place at Sydney Showground, Sydney Olympic Park on 7 – 10 March 2017.

AUSPACK 2017 is on track to be the biggest Sydney show in its history coinciding with the recent announcement that with five months out, 95% of exhibition space has already been sold.

“Visitors can expect a number of new elements to the offering on the exhibition floor,” said Exhibition Director Luke Kasprzak.

“We’re always looking for ways to innovate, which includes the ongoing strategic partnership with the Australian Institute of Packaging (AIP) and their full schedule industry-led educational forum and the launch of a dedicated Processing Day which is sure to attract the interest of the food and beverage processing industry at our free, four day event.”

“As the industry moves towards smarter engineering, data, automation and robotics become key so it is imperative we highlight this trend on the show floor. Other trends featured include food safety and hygiene, active and intelligent packaging and a continued focus on food processing.”

Leading exhibitors include Walls Machinery, insignia, Case Packaging Systems, Biotec Solutions, Matthews, Contract Packaging Systems and Visy and major international exhibitors include Cama, Concetti, Multiplex Packaging, Qimarox and Krueger & Salecker Mascinenbau.

Some highlights on display will include the recently launched Ishida X-ray inspection systems, an Australian First Multi Flex1 Twin Stretch Hooder from Danish company Lachenmeier, intelli-flav OMS 5 a new seasoning system from tna and new Shrink Tunnels for robotic packaging from AUTOPACK.

“It’s all about maximising the visitor’s time while onsite at AUSPACK 2017 to ensure their business objectives are met and their expectations exceeded,” said Mr Kasprzak.

“As Australasia’s most comprehensive, free, food, beverage and pharmaceutical processing and packaging exhibition, there is a lot to pack into four days so we want to make their experience as simple and useful as possible.”

Concurrent events include the Official Networking Drinks, on the first day for exhibitors and VIP Visitors to network and unwind, the 2017 AIP National Technical Forums and the inaugural Packaging and Innovation Design Awards (PIDA).

AUSPACK 2017 is Australasia’s most comprehensive processing and packaging event, and is taking place 7 – 10 March at Sydney Showgrounds, Sydney Olympic Park. The event is free to attend.

To register for free, please visit the AUSPACK website: http://www.auspack.com.au/

Kyle Maxey writes on engineering.com that the CAD landscape is littered with firms trying to sell you their CAD products. But when the rubber meets the road, there are only a handful of firms that are swallowing up most of the market share.

In this infographic, you'll get a precise look at exactly who the biggest players in the CAD market are and find out how one of the biggest and faster emerging trends, cloud-based CAD, is quickly gaining ground and even overtaking many established software stalwarts.

Further reading on cnccookbook

An ex-employee reader responds to the question “Do you want another Ministry of Works?”

For a while in the 1960s I worked as a labourer at the Ministry of Works Benmore dam site. It has been fashionable now for an entire generation to deride the MoW, everything it stood for, and everything it did. Yet I believe that the MoW is now worthy of some impartial scrutiny and especially so in the way in which it routinely went about its business in what are now viewed as critical spheres of activity in the productive sector. Among them:-     *   Quality Control     *   Staff induction and management     *   Technical training     *   Environment     *   SafetyFirst though a personal disclosure. When I signed up at Otematata other than a strong back there was little to recommend me in terms of formal qualifications. In the event I was hired and assigned to the single men’s camp, and told to turn up at a designated truck stop early the following morning to be taken to the site.

In fact, the next morning, I was dropped off at the site plant nursery. It was only much later that I realised that during my preliminary interview I had mentioned a very brief holiday job planting trees and a vague interest in silviculture in general. This had been carefully noted.

I was to find in the Otematata site nursery that everyone involved in it was highly qualified, notably the head nurseryman named Sid who had spent his entire career in the vocation. In various other roles in and around Benmore I was to find that the Ministry of Works had in common with the army a dislike of on-the-job training. You had to arrive at the job, whatever it was, already trained for it.

The planting out of the trees, notably willow and poplar poles, around the Benmore Lake area was then described as being for erosion control. But I noted too that care was taken that ornamental species were dotted in and around the more functional tree species.

After a while I was sent to another depot, this time with quite a different purpose, and known as The Reclaim. This was simply a vast open air yard reconditioning plant in which the wooden boxing used to shape and form the poured concrete was scraped bare so that it could be used again. Mechanical equipment was similarly scraped of concrete so that it too could be re-applied.

It was only much later that I came to realise that I had been involved, courtesy of the Ministry of Works, with what would now be readily described as recycling, or, more grandly, the environmental “movement.”

On the dam site itself I observed at every stage the calculating and re-calculating of every operation before it in fact took place. In terms of concrete pouring nothing happened at all without the sanction of what was known as the concrete “technician,” who generally turned out to be Dutch.

The Ministry of Works had a safety record that would stand up to this day. Nothing was taken for granted.

On one smoko break in the middle of a particularly arid part of the site area a group of us were sitting down and using the tyres of a Euclid as back rest.

A Land Rover came to an abrupt halt in front of the group. A foreman leaped out and crisply instructed us to move away. There had been a case somewhere of such a giant earthmover tyre bursting and injuring those close to it.

A criticism of the MoW nowadays is to the effect that the labouring force was stuck there in the labouring category and that there was no upward path in terms of promotion. In fact, I observed that any reasonably diligent youngster could work his way up. Again, and as with the army, you worked your way up through the ranks--- leading hand, charge hand, foreman. Then there was the opportunity of breaking into the commissioned officer class via an engineering degree.

Engineers ran the show. They exercised their authority by moral suasion. At the very top was the Project Engineer. The following tale will demonstrate the absence of any elitism.

On one occasion I was invited to a party at the house of a fellow-labourer who happened to be married and thus lived in the married people’s section of the town which featured uniform state house design white painted bungalows.

On inquiring who my friend’s neighbour was I was mildly surprised to learn that it was the Project Engineer who lived there, next door, in an identical house and with his wife and family.

An Englishman present was incredulous that someone who was personally responsible for the success or otherwise of one of the world’s major construction schemes (Benmore, pictured, was then the planet’s biggest earth-fill dam) could possibly be billeted next door to one of his labourers.

Yet this was the case. The Ministry of Works never fell into the trappings trap.

The days of which I write were sometime before the era in which the productive sector, like all other areas of human activity became engulfed in the newspeak required to blunt the sense of anything upon which might be placed an impolite construction.

The single men’s cabin camp had emblazoned on its main entrance a sign which stated “Women and Bailiffs not Allowed.”

The camp sergeant, as he would not now be described, was a larger-than-life fellow called Taffy. He was rumoured to be rich, owning a large farm in the region, but finding it more congenial to run the camp rather than his farm which was in the hands of a manager.

He was ultra frugal. A curious thing about the camp cabins was that in spite of their proximity to this immense electrical generation capability, each one of them was metered. Taffy, when the time came for a brew up, would always take his Zip to one of the communal areas, such as the laundry, in order to by-pass his own meter.

Anyway, on one occasion, I asked him about the sign at the gate, the one forbidding females.“Oh,” he responded in a matter of fact manner. “That is what the men here wanted.”

The Waitaki River stepped hydro scheme was the high water mark of the Ministry of Works. This was the culmination of its role as the national concentrated focus of civil engineering resources in order that gigantic works which otherwise would be unachievable were in fact achieved.

Nothing lasts for ever and the nibbling away at its authority was even then visible. Much earlier Bechtel did the Rimutaka Tunnel. Problems with construction tunnelling was an acknowledged deficiency in the Ministry of Works armoury and at Benmore I noticed how readily hard rock miners from the Balkans were welcomed into the polyglot fold.

Downer did Roxburgh. Utah, Manapouri. Then Codelfa, Tongariro. The writing was on the penstocks.

The Ministry of Works was swept away in the 1980s and its expertise sold-off to Malaysia in the form of Opus (Latin for work.)

So why am I writing all this, more than half a century afterward? It is because at an engineering conference in Wellington I, along with the rest of the audience, was rhetorically asked by a high-level speaker defending the government position on several contentious fronts .....

“Do you want another Ministry of Works?”This is exactly the kind of rebellion-quelling response that high-level officials are trained and qualified to give.

My answer, had I been required to respond individually would have been.“No I do not. The government can no longer run the risk of being both simultaneously operator and regulator.”

Had I been, in my imagination, pressed further I would have mentioned the perilous wire tripped by the state’s dual involvement as operator-cum-regulator in mining. Pushed, I might have mentioned its similar dodgy dual role in loosey goosy sectors such as entertainment.

As is the New Zealand way when the old Ministry of Works was declared a bad thing, everything about it was bad, and over the years, as the government speaker knew, got worse in memory with each year that passed by.

And yet....and yet.....Along with others who were there, I remember the expert but no-frills management style, the exceptional ability of the engineers and the loyalty and the diligence it all inspired in the workers of which for a while I was one.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Friday 21 October 2016

An ex-employee reader responds to the question “Do you want another Ministry of Works?”

For a while in the 1960s I worked as a labourer at the Ministry of Works Benmore dam site. It has been fashionable now for an entire generation to deride the MoW, everything it stood for, and everything it did. Yet I believe that the MoW is now worthy of some impartial scrutiny and especially so in the way in which it routinely went about its business in what are now viewed as critical spheres of activity in the productive sector. Among them:-     *   Quality Control     *   Staff induction and management     *   Technical training     *   Environment     *   SafetyFirst though a personal disclosure. When I signed up at Otematata other than a strong back there was little to recommend me in terms of formal qualifications. In the event I was hired and assigned to the single men’s camp, and told to turn up at a designated truck stop early the following morning to be taken to the site.

In fact, the next morning, I was dropped off at the site plant nursery. It was only much later that I realised that during my preliminary interview I had mentioned a very brief holiday job planting trees and a vague interest in silviculture in general. This had been carefully noted.

I was to find in the Otematata site nursery that everyone involved in it was highly qualified, notably the head nurseryman named Sid who had spent his entire career in the vocation. In various other roles in and around Benmore I was to find that the Ministry of Works had in common with the army a dislike of on-the-job training. You had to arrive at the job, whatever it was, already trained for it.

The planting out of the trees, notably willow and poplar poles, around the Benmore Lake area was then described as being for erosion control. But I noted too that care was taken that ornamental species were dotted in and around the more functional tree species.

After a while I was sent to another depot, this time with quite a different purpose, and known as The Reclaim. This was simply a vast open air yard reconditioning plant in which the wooden boxing used to shape and form the poured concrete was scraped bare so that it could be used again. Mechanical equipment was similarly scraped of concrete so that it too could be re-applied.

It was only much later that I came to realise that I had been involved, courtesy of the Ministry of Works, with what would now be readily described as recycling, or, more grandly, the environmental “movement.”

On the dam site itself I observed at every stage the calculating and re-calculating of every operation before it in fact took place. In terms of concrete pouring nothing happened at all without the sanction of what was known as the concrete “technician,” who generally turned out to be Dutch.

The Ministry of Works had a safety record that would stand up to this day. Nothing was taken for granted.

On one smoko break in the middle of a particularly arid part of the site area a group of us were sitting down and using the tyres of a Euclid as back rest.

A Land Rover came to an abrupt halt in front of the group. A foreman leaped out and crisply instructed us to move away. There had been a case somewhere of such a giant earthmover tyre bursting and injuring those close to it.

A criticism of the MoW nowadays is to the effect that the labouring force was stuck there in the labouring category and that there was no upward path in terms of promotion. In fact, I observed that any reasonably diligent youngster could work his way up. Again, and as with the army, you worked your way up through the ranks--- leading hand, charge hand, foreman. Then there was the opportunity of breaking into the commissioned officer class via an engineering degree.

Engineers ran the show. They exercised their authority by moral suasion. At the very top was the Project Engineer. The following tale will demonstrate the absence of any elitism.

On one occasion I was invited to a party at the house of a fellow-labourer who happened to be married and thus lived in the married people’s section of the town which featured uniform state house design white painted bungalows.

On inquiring who my friend’s neighbour was I was mildly surprised to learn that it was the Project Engineer who lived there, next door, in an identical house and with his wife and family.

An Englishman present was incredulous that someone who was personally responsible for the success or otherwise of one of the world’s major construction schemes (Benmore, pictured, was then the planet’s biggest earth-fill dam) could possibly be billeted next door to one of his labourers.

Yet this was the case. The Ministry of Works never fell into the trappings trap.

The days of which I write were sometime before the era in which the productive sector, like all other areas of human activity became engulfed in the newspeak required to blunt the sense of anything upon which might be placed an impolite construction.

The single men’s cabin camp had emblazoned on its main entrance a sign which stated “Women and Bailiffs not Allowed.”

The camp sergeant, as he would not now be described, was a larger-than-life fellow called Taffy. He was rumoured to be rich, owning a large farm in the region, but finding it more congenial to run the camp rather than his farm which was in the hands of a manager.

He was ultra frugal. A curious thing about the camp cabins was that in spite of their proximity to this immense electrical generation capability, each one of them was metered. Taffy, when the time came for a brew up, would always take his Zip to one of the communal areas, such as the laundry, in order to by-pass his own meter.

Anyway, on one occasion, I asked him about the sign at the gate, the one forbidding females.“Oh,” he responded in a matter of fact manner. “That is what the men here wanted.”

The Waitaki River stepped hydro scheme was the high water mark of the Ministry of Works. This was the culmination of its role as the national concentrated focus of civil engineering resources in order that gigantic works which otherwise would be unachievable were in fact achieved.

Nothing lasts for ever and the nibbling away at its authority was even then visible. Much earlier Bechtel did the Rimutaka Tunnel. Problems with construction tunnelling was an acknowledged deficiency in the Ministry of Works armoury and at Benmore I noticed how readily hard rock miners from the Balkans were welcomed into the polyglot fold.

Downer did Roxburgh. Utah, Manapouri. Then Codelfa, Tongariro. The writing was on the penstocks.

The Ministry of Works was swept away in the 1980s and its expertise sold-off to Malaysia in the form of Opus (Latin for work.)

So why am I writing all this, more than half a century afterward? It is because at an engineering conference in Wellington I, along with the rest of the audience, was rhetorically asked by a high-level speaker defending the government position on several contentious fronts .....

“Do you want another Ministry of Works?”This is exactly the kind of rebellion-quelling response that high-level officials are trained and qualified to give.

My answer, had I been required to respond individually would have been.“No I do not. The government can no longer run the risk of being both simultaneously operator and regulator.”

Had I been, in my imagination, pressed further I would have mentioned the perilous wire tripped by the state’s dual involvement as operator-cum-regulator in mining. Pushed, I might have mentioned its similar dodgy dual role in loosey goosy sectors such as entertainment.

As is the New Zealand way when the old Ministry of Works was declared a bad thing, everything about it was bad, and over the years, as the government speaker knew, got worse in memory with each year that passed by.

And yet....and yet.....Along with others who were there, I remember the expert but no-frills management style, the exceptional ability of the engineers and the loyalty and the diligence it all inspired in the workers of which for a while I was one.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Friday 21 October 2016