So tell us about the roots of the company?
We started off just selling a lot of kit – laptops, desktops, etc – to smaller businesses as we’d found in our experience that market just wasn’t being served well.
But by about 2004, when we’d grown the company to about the two million mark, we found margins were going and we suffered accordingly. So we shifted the business around, built up our own infrastructure in data centres until we could offer the market what we thought were new and innovative services, moving into the managed hosting and services business instead, offering things like online disaster recovery, too.
I’ve read somewhere that you think you were early into the cloud?
Well we do think that; we were heavily into virtualisation and what is now called that in about 2005, yes. Though I would say customers sometime struggle to understand what that concept [cloud] means.
So what happened since, after you made this move?
Things have gone very well for us. We are up to £4m turnover and expect to get to around £5m next year.
That’s quite impressive turnaround. What do you see as the reasons for that, commercially?
I have to say that – in London, especially – there is huge pent-up demand that companies like ours are really benefiting from. I think that we’ve had three, four years now of recession where people have been doing nothing, ICT-wise at least.
There’s been years of navel-gazing and holding breath – and I have to say that that’s finally changing. There’s almost this huge release of pent-up breath as people say they can’t do nothing any longer, they have to go back to investing in technology for growth again.
You see the end of the recession, then?
I see a lot of work for our end of the IT sector, a lot of need for innovation, if that answers your question.
Let’s go back to what specifically it is you provide these customers; what the sort of thing they are looking for is?
Sure. So as I said, it’s all virtual – virtual servers, storage, I/O, everything. For literally one-man band companies all the way up to 2,000, 3,000 desktop organisations, both in the UK and internationally, we are providing true managed services.
In what markets?
Legal, healthcare, professional services, some housing associations. A few of our customers I can quote are Cambian Healthcare and NHS Brent. In the latter’s case, that’s a clear example of how the cloud can help the bottom line. NHS Brent has virtualised 90% of its original physical servers, eliminating the associated costs with powering and cooling 36 servers, which it’s told us is giving it a saving of almost £40,000 and a reduction in related carbon emissions. Cambian’s a very important partnership for us, by the way, as it shows how you can support 2,500 staff across 42 sites with a real corporate-class cloud, as we’ve done.
Sounds great, but with respect, and as I’m sure you know, there are lots of managed services companies out there. What makes you different or stand out?
There are lots of different sorts of managed services, too, of course – from tenanted all the way up to the big guys like Google. But I hear what you are saying. Well, we do have some technology to offer of course, like our ‘Virtualisation without Walls’ model (which has been built using VMware, Compellent and Cisco technologies), which provides all our clients with improved ROI potential from next generation virtualisation.
But if you want specifics, I’d have to say – and I know it can sound a bit trite – that what ‘stands us out’ is service, the level of service we give to clients.
So can you sum up, then, what your message is to the CBR readership?
I’d say that what we have been seeing is borne out by what all the customers I talk to are agreeing with – the idea that the time for tight belts is over and that ultimately, companies can’t do with IT. I am glad that’s finally come to the fore again and I think the rest of 2011 is going to be very positive – both for us at Atlanta and the rest of the market, to be frank.
