You only recently joined Hornbill as CEO. What’s the story there?
Yes, I joined Hornbill in February 2010 as CEO to take on responsibility for all operational and development aspects of the company’s service management applications. The previous CEO and founder, Gerry Sweeney, who set the company up in 1995, has moved over to become full time CTO so he can concentrate fully on the development side. I have 25 years experience in the IT sector having graduated through sales, sales management and general management in the UK and across EMEA in firms like Oracle, BEA, Progress Software and Computer Associates (CA).
Does that suggest there is some kind of a problem with the company, that change?
My job is to focus on growth and opportunity for the company going forward, especially internationally. Basically, there is no reason we can’t reproduce our success in the UK market overseas. There is also great opportunity as to be frank, hardly any organisation globally is 100% ITIL [IT Infrastructure Library] compliant – they can be nearly there in one aspect but still on spreadsheets in others. We also compete with very expensive systems that we can very effectively under-cut, which is obviously of great interest to many customers in the current market. With just 80 people we have 650 customers, as I said, mainly locally, in the public and private sectors, ranging from charities to local government to the NHS, as well as Halfords, Comet, many others – we’ve also done the last four Olympics, Vancouver-Athens-Turin-Beijing. We have also a very strong reputation for customer support, built up by being wholly committed to service management the past 15 years.
Sounds very strong – still don’t see the issue?
We still only have 10% in the UK of a very competitive market so there is huge potential here. We have no debt, no outside investors or VCs, we are highly profitable and are 100% focused on service management, which is one of the great unsung British global success stories in ICT.
Yes, we did develop ITIL out of public sector ICT project experience… mainly bad, as we have screwed it up so often.
(Laughs) Well, I can tell you there is a global recognition that things like IT service management is a great, solid development many organisations find extremely useful. This was always true in the US, now it’s getting more and more of a hearing globally.
What is service management’s contribution, then?
It’s all about helping ensure you can make service delivery guaranteed – that there will be things that in circumstance x you can always sure will happen. It’s not a panacea and we don’t say it is, but what it does offer is a set of reliable procedures and guidelines to help deliver more reliable processes, especially around IT service and support.
One has to ask if that is a must-have in the current market – isn’t that a nice-to-have?
Not surprisingly, I disagree. Take something as simple as password reset. We are working with a customer’s help desk where 40% of the calls are just for that – and it costs them £10 a time to sort out the problem. They are spending £15,000 a month on just that! We’ve just brought out a tool for that that can offer six months ROI and make that go away. So we argue that moving to things like service management can give immediate benefits like that – you can really move to very slick systems to start better taking care of service needs.
