Kym Houden, 2010 Dell Take Your Own Path Hero
The TYOP Concept
It takes an extraordinary person to launch and grow a business. Michael
Dell is that kind of visionary. He saw an opportunity to make technology
more accessible to people and organizations around the world and
revolutionized an industry. Michael is just one of the many achievers
who dared to take his own path with a view of how technology could
enable human potential everywhere.
Building on this heritage and
recognizing the unique challenges and rocky journeys entrepreneurs can
face led to the inception of Dell’s Take Your Own Path (TYOP) campaign —
Dell’s first, truly global marketing campaign. Partnering with Intel,
the Take Your Own Path campaign tells the stories of pioneering
entrepreneurs like Michael — whom Dell calls heroes. Dell is showcasing
our success, to demonstrate how small and medium businesses can leverage
technology strategies to grow, better serve their customers, and
increase productivity and efficiency. Dell believes that the success of
its customers equals the success of Dell.
Incorporated in 2000, Task Retail Technology has grown to be one of
Australia’s leading point-of-sale (POS) software developers, supplying
turnkey retail POS systems to a wide range of high-profile hospitality,
franchise chains, retail outlets, stadiums and large venues. A strong
focus on customer service, adding value and technology innovation has
fueled this growth. Driven by a lack of functionality and scalability of
software in the market, Task Retail Technology commenced development of
the Xchangexec™ software suite in 2006. As a highly successful and
experienced value-added reseller, Task Retail saw the need to take
advantage of the new wave of emerging Web centric technologies, mainly
to address market demand for an affordable, stable and easy way to
deploy and manage very large numbers of POS terminals across widely
dispersed retail enterprises. Xchangexec is the culmination of those
efforts, a globally scalable, retail POS application with a securely
hosted management suite. The application harnesses the power of the
Internet to deliver real time sales data, centralized POS terminal
management, interactive customer loyalty, SMS ordering and electronic
menu boards to any retail enterprise or large entertainment venue.
Kym
Houden has been in the POS technology business for over 25 years, and
in 2000 he decided to make the jump and start his own business
(initially run out of his house) to capitalize on the deficiencies
he saw in many of the POS systems on the market at the time. Task has
achieved great success in its first ten years — achieving 100 percent
growth year after year.
Built on his father's philosophy —
“Believe in yourself because if you don’t, no one else will” — Kym has
his company poised for international growth.
All of the data that
passes across Task Retail’s systems and networks is very sensitive to
its customers. Data security is not an option — it is a must have. That
said, Task Retail’s customers need to know that their data is safe but
also accessible.
What’s the cost of a critical loss of data or
experiencing a network outage? Depending on the incident and its
severity, it could easily range from a week’s revenue to the loss of
your entire business. The right IT infrastructure from Dell provides
real protections that help you avoid disaster. Dell PowerEdge Servers
based on the Intel Xeon Processor 5600 Series leverage Intel’s leading
technologies to establish superior protection and reliability.
“We
need the ability to be able to make sure that our customers' data is
not compromised in any way whatsoever, so we chose Dell for the best
technology and that’s what we deliver. The peace of mind knowing that it
is backed up by Dell servers and then RAID 5 technology means that we
will never have an issue whereby data loss has happened.”