Gary Flood talks to Bill Halbert, Executive Chairman of KCOM Group, formed in 2009 through the merger of Kingston Communications and Affiniti.
Q. I suspect many of our readers will be familiar with the name Kingston Communications, but your group now has a new brand. So let’s start afresh: what is Kcom all about in 2010?
A. We are all about providing integrated communications services from consumer to multi-site enterprise, from our calls, lines and services business in East Yorkshire to local government and firms like BA, but with our main focus being on the mid-range organisation. In effect, we are an SME ourselves, so find it very simple to work with SMEs of over 100 people. Since a request at the July 2009 AGM I have been combining the roles of Chairman and CEO though I have been on the board, originally in a non-executive role, since last 2006.
Q. What do you see as your USP for such firms? How, for example, could you help a CBR CIO of a midsize firm reading this? Cut costs, what?
A. At the consumer end, yes, cost is a huge business driver. But as you go up the stack that emphasis shifts to one of criticality. We all live in a post-Internet, post-IP, social networked world where communications is a must have and some organisations, frankly, struggle to integrate it all. We can work with that CIO to provide a way to link the processes he needs to from talking to customers to supporting internal collaboration. Support of those critical business apps with one contract. Not many communications companies can do all of that but still be of a size where we are not about protecting our incumbent revenue – the company will get our attention.
Q. So walk us through some case studies to try and exemplify how you do help such organisations, please.
A. We have been working with BA for over 10 years, for example, in their LAN operations and were one of the principal suppliers for the Heathrow T5 initiative.
Q. [Laughs] Why choose an almost notoriously bad project as your first example?
A. I wouldn’t agree with that and I’d have to say that the network was one of the things that worked perfectly well on the day.
Q. Indeed. But let’s hear some others anyway, please.
A. Sure. For Specsavers, we host an online app that has let more than four million customers nationwide try their potential new glasses online after uploading an image of their face onto the website, Digital Mirror. We power that from two managed servers at our London Global Switch data centre. In the public sector, we were chosen by North Wales Police to replace its IT infrastructure across 76 sites, a project that delivered savings of around £130,000 per year. And we’ve just won a contract to support Phones 4U across its entire 600 branch network, helping them among other things roll out a new wide area network to develop the business further.
Q. I’m not sure how the consumer side fits into all this?
A. As you know, we have roots stretching back over 100 years [1902] to fixed-line provision in our original home base of Kingston-upon-Hull, where the local authority famously never linked up to what became BT. That is still a very important part of our business and we provide very competitive services to 200,000 subscribers.
Q. I know that you are also active in the public sector.
A. Luckily we have never been big in that central Departmental space where the big IT projects live but where the axe in the Spending Review is going to fall first. Instead, we have been very successful helping a range of local authority customers – though we also work with the NHS and the emergency services – to digitise the services they offer citizens, which is of course becoming more and more a focus as they face increasing budget pressure too.
Q. To sum up, then – why would I want to work with the firm I may still think of as Kingston Communications?
A. As I have said – smaller firms like to buy from smaller firms. Our ability to provide truly end to end managed services combined with focus on the customer is something we’d argue few players in the communications market can offer. That single point of contact with someone with our strength in depth is a powerful message, I’d argue.
