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BiTEA is an IT technology based company located in Maldon, Essex, United Kingdom, specialising in the area of secure communications.

The company was formed in November 2005 by owners and Directors Alan Hanna and Phil Durham to design, develop and support a range of professional mobile radio and TETRA related products. Bitea have developed an innovative network validation management software tool for verifying and monitoring TETRA Digital Radio systems.TETRA stands for Terrestrial Trunked Radio which is a state of the art digital encrypted mobile radio system, currently being introduced world wide, particularly where secure and reliable communications between Public Safety Organisations is required. In the UK, TETRA is well established with the Police and is being introduced to the Fire and Ambulance services. The UK Public Safety TETRA network is operated by Airwave.

BiTEA is also set up to take on project work for the design of hardware and embedded software for control and security systems. It is also a reseller for rugged portable computers from Sweden, manufactured for military use and suitable for mobile data functions.

Considering that Bitea is a relatively young company (it is currently in its second year of trading), it has already achieved remarkable success in the domestic market:In a time when secure communications are of particular importance for public safety, Bitea is rightly proud to count the UK MOD and the UK Police Forces among its clients.This success is due to the great expertise and experience of the Directors Alan and Phil who have been involved professionally with mobile radio, electronics and computing since 1969 as design engineers and business managers.Phil Durham’s career spans from being a radio engineer at the Royal Navy, to working for many years as a pilot flying big commercial aircrafts, to taking a company to the Stock Exchange in the City of London!“During my long and varied career I have learned that it is important to look to the future the whole time and to never stand still”, Phil says.“Now that our products are well established in the UK market, the next step is to export them to those European countries where the use of the TETRA system creates a demand for our products”, he adds.Contacts have already been made with potential distributors/agents in the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany.

Having traveled the world in different professional capacities, Phil is very much aware of the important part that language and culture play in opening foreign markets.Although at the early stages in their export strategy, Phil and Alan took advice from their RLN East Adviser on the support available with regard to language and culture in order to be prepared for things to come.In December 2006, they both attended a workshop on Germany organised by RLN East.“We found the seminar very interesting and useful.Understanding the culture of your overseas partners and where they are coming from is very important”, says Phil.“This background knowledge has helped us recently when we started to enter into quite complex negotiations with our potential German distributors.Without the knowledge of the German business mentality it would have been quite easy to get discouraged”.Instead, Phil is thinking about involving a German native speaker into the negotiations.“It can have such a positive effect when business partners are being addressed in their own language”, he adds.

Phil is also keen to have the Bitea website translated into several languages in the near future.Initially, he had hoped to translate the website into 12 languages, but with the advice of the RLN East Adviser, this could be narrowed down to a more manageable number of four languages by looking closely at the target markets and their likelihood to speak English.The RLN East Adviser also provided details of reliable translation providers, so that Phil has all the information required to set things in motion at the opportune time. It seems that Bitea is well on its way to repeating its success story in the European market!