The legacy of Sir Angus

I developed a huge amount of respect for Sir Angus Tait and the contribution he made to the New Zealand economy, and to the lives of thousands of hard working people, when I spent a few years as a marketing executive in his radio frequency communications company Tait Communications.

As the ioSphere IoT team are setting out to build a world beating satellite IIoT communications business for the new Swarm network, we know we are very, very fortunate to be taking on this particular challenge in Christchurch because of the immense legacy of Sir Angus Tait.

Sir Angus set Christchurch up to become a high tech power house in more ways than one...

By creating a large, high-tech employer right in the city he allowed the city's latent engineering talent to flourish and he attracted more and more talented electronics engineers to come and live here over the years.

Then, by endowing millions of dollars to the University of Canterbury's Wireless Research Centre (WRC), and to the National ICT Innovation Institute (NZi3) based at the University of Canterbury, his company has helped produce generations of world class engineers here.

Thanks to his vision and hard work, you would be very hard pressed to find any city on earth with more RF (radio frequency) engineering talent to draw on, to develop a satellite IoT gateway for the new Swarm LEO network, than Christchurch.

Half of our team built their skills while working at Tait. At least 50% of the external IoT engineering experts we now collaborate with have also worked in or with Tait over the years.

Sir Angus also showed us that it was possible to build a truly global technology brand here. When you dig into many of the other Christchurch based technology success stories, you find they too were started by people who learned about electronic engineering and international business at Tait.

Truly something to aspire to.

Hamish Hutton, CEO of ioSphere