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SouthTechMISSION CRITICALFOR ECONOMIC PROSPERITY

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Commissioned by WhiteoaksPublished by DECISION magazine in association withNatWest and Grant Thornton

www.decisionmagazine.co.uk

Copyright L A Dillner, publisher 2016

First published in DECISION magazine in October 2016. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic, or print, including photocopying - without the prior permission in writing of the publishers.

No responsibility for loss occasioned to any individual or business acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material from this book can be accepted by the authors, publishers or any party involved in its compilation, publication, and distribution.

Writing by Larry Dillner and Susan Fenton, www.fwords.co.ukPhotography by Andy Scaysbrook, www.andyscaysbrook.comDesign by Jill Din, Artz, www.artz.co.uk

Typeset in Times New Roman, Helvetica TT Bold

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Introduction

The south of England is the key region in the UK for worldclass technology companies, and their success is vital if the country is to build a knowledge-based economy.

But what are the specific operational and strategic issues which have an impact on their ability to grow and achieve their potential?

Companies with market leadership credentials as well as those with the ability to achieve that position provide a barometer reading, and reveal how they are building long-term value in such a constantly dynamic market.

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New generation withhigh expectationsEver thought that a thirteen-year-old could tell you anything that would be of value to your business? Probably not, but Chris Gabriel thinks we should all be paying attention to what teenagers want, because in a few years they will be the new generation of consumers and they will have high expectations.

As the chief digital officer at international IT solutions and managed services provider Logicalis UK, explains: “The average teenager thinks you will be able to produce anything with 3D printing soon. By the time they get out of school they won’t just think it, they will expect it.”

Teenagers, he says, are actually even more IT literate than they’re often given credit for, not simply because the average teen has five devices, against Gabriel’s two, but because increasingly, they understand the technology that runs them.

“At the moment there’s a bit of a dip in education where we lack data science analytics and agile coders, but we’re about to come out of it,” he says. “My eight-year-old in a couple of years will be using online analytic tools in geography and they will be coding in schools. They’re being educated better than we think they are, and three years from now we will see the emergence of that into the real world. I don’t think a seventeen-year-old will take my job next week but one of our big-brain scientists is only twenty-two.”

Gabriel thinks all school leavers will be data scientists in some way, even if ‘IT’ isn’t part of their job titles. “ They will be technologists in some way, like it or not,” he suggests.

He also thinks teens are also more savvy about data security than is often assumed. “I think they’re very aware of the risks of having stuff on Facebook they would rather people didn’t see.” In this respect they can be less naïve than their parents. “My wife’s on Facebook all the time and all her friends talk about how they’re going away at the weekend,” winces Gabriel,

referring to the dangers of giving away too much information. “The next generation will be far more aware of the implications.”

Referring to Google’s so-called ‘right to be forgotten’, he says the vast majority of teens (far more than their parents’ generation) are aware of it and expect to be able to use it. He says that research suggests teenagers are reluctant to share data with Facebook as they assume it will be sold. They are far more trusting of government bodies and, to a lesser extent, of brands. “They will often change their passwords, not because of the risk of their bank balance being hacked but to protect their personal data from being used by sales and marketing firms,” suggests Gabriel.

What that means to companies, he says, is that they are going to have to talk to youngsters about a “value exchange.”

Much of Gabriel’s role involves “future gazing” to identify such trends, to help business to understand what’s coming and what customers will expect. “It’s multi-faceted predictive stuff,” he explains, “insights which can give companies a different perspective to their strategic thinking. We’re saying to companies ‘this stuff is on its way, and you need to know how do you harness it’.”

“Intimacy and innovation are valuable,” says Gabriel. “We have access to the same material as everyone else and the quality of the stuff is the same, so the difference is how we can offer real intelligence quickly. Customers just want the answer and they can’t wait two years because by then it would be irrelevant.”

Gabriel cites the development of the internet of things as a good example of future gazing. “One per cent of everything that could be connected is connected. One day it all will be. They could be,” he adds, pointing at the water dispenser and coffee machine in the meeting area of his offices.

Logicalis employ nearly 3700 people worldwide, have almost 6000 customers and post yearly revenues of $1.6billion from operations in Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific. Insight comes from all these regions. “Europeans are the most

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conservative about this new stuff; they’re ‘calm down and let’s think about it’,” says Gabriel. “Emerging markets are far more excited by it; the Latin attitude is if they can use this stuff to help them live their lives, fantastic.”

He foresees a time when a petrol station would recognise whether a customer had a petrol or diesel car and not allow it to fill up with the wrong sort of fuel. “That has real usefulness,” he says. “A hundred thousand cars are filled with the wrong fuel each year.”

This combination of “mega shifts and gradual shifts” is what Logicalis are investing in, says Gabriel. One of a string of acquisitions was Trovus, a “number crunching” UK analytics company, with the aim of further positioning Logicalis as a “trusted advisor on the next wave of rapid big data analytics.” The company wants to become a driving force in the emerging digital markets driven by social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies (SMAC). And a business in Germany was acquired for its expertise in spatial intelligence.

Meaning? Gabriel explains by way of example: “We’re been doing a project with a university so they can understand who is using their library and how often. They made some big assumptions about the time that the average student spent there. With the application of spatial intelligence the university discovered the reality that most were really only coming in to print off their work. The findings enabled the university to address actuality.”

Increasingly, says Gabriel, today’s chief technology officer has to work in concert with the more recent role of chief digital officer. “The CDO is the futurologist who sees the trend and the CTO has to deliver it. That should translate to faster, quicker, better.”

As IT becomes increasingly automated, Gabriel sees the HR demands shifting. “We will still need technology people like coders but there will be a requirement for more business process expertise as well, to provide the interface between the business and IT.

“That’s a critical change we need to invest in, finding people who can tell the IT which is going to be required at a abstract level,

rather than hard coding and specific current requirements.”

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the pace of technological change accelerated during the last recession. “We all went into the downturn with laptops and came out with iPads and wearable technologies which didn’t exist when it started,” says Gabriel. “We entered it in one world and came out in another. The innovation that happened during the recession was a bigger transformation than happened in the previous ten years.”

And it’s still evolving. “This generation will be the last to have land-line phones on the desks,” Gabriel predicts. “Soon it will all be mobile. And we’ll get big wows as we find new things to do with the wireless network, the mega internet of things.”

When to trustinternet reviewsBack in 2010, when Andy Mabbutt and Matt Eames set up Feefo Holdings, the internet, then as now, was awash with dodginess. “If you know what you’re doing, can still fool a lot of people, says Mabbutt. “If a company is on page one of Google, it means they’re great at optimisation; their product and service could still be terrible.”

Similarly, positive product or service reviews aren’t necessarily the views of happy customers - they could be the creation of the company’s marketing department.

“Our idea was to ensure that all customer reviews on the internet would be genuine and could be trusted,” explains Mabbutt. “Our feedback platform would create authenticity of data as the process would be started by the customer actually making a purchase. That would trigger a feedback request from Feefo, inviting them to leave a review.”

Early interest came from internet retail entrepreneurs. Oufitters Charles Tyrwhitt for example reported that they found they were

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If there is a negative response, Feefo send notification to the client’s customer service department so they can respond straight away.” By having the opportunity to do that,” says Mabbutt, “they can turn a critic into an advocate, if they don’t allow the problem to fester.”

The customer feedback can’t be modified or edited in any way, although Feefo moderate for profanity or if there is a legal issue. If a company addresses a problem following a review, then the customer can adjust their original submission. Any response from the company is also made public alongside the original review.

User reviews are critical in improving positioning within the search engines, and Feefo partner with Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Companies pay a monthly subscription fee, and Feefo are working with more than 2500 customers globally, including brands such as Expedia, and Notonthehighstreet.com.

The Feefo platform has been translated into twenty-seven different languages and offices have been opened in the US, Hong Kong, and Australia. “Ultimately we want our brand to become a global kitemark for trust,” says Mabbutt.

There are plenty of market sectors for Feefo to move into - arguably every single one provides opportunities, even those in the public sector. “Take up will partly depend on how concerned organisations are about transparency,” observes Mabbutt. “But with consumers becoming increasingly wary of fake reviews it is something they are going to have to get used to.”

With 70million consumers in the UK, Feefo could be in a position to provide the most comprehensive of behavioural analytics, while at the same time profiling which are the issues each demographic feels most strongly about.

gaining more reviews than ever before. Not that Mabbutt was surprised. “The only reviews most companies had been getting were from customers who had either had an exceptional experience, or weren’t really happy with their purchase. But Feefo captures the wider audience, the silent majority. Retailers found that instead of 200 reviews a month, they were receiving thousands.”

It also meant they could identify problems, solve them more quickly, and track possible trends, because the Feefo platform was also providing them with business analytics and insights. “One retailer, from the Feefo feedback, realised they had a potential problem with a Chinese factory,” recalls Mabbutt. “They identified this in just a couple of weeks, and it would have taken months otherwise. The customers affected would previously have said nothing, except to friends and family, but they would never have gone back. And simply by telling friends and family, their discontent could have been viewed by millions on social media.”

“The initial USP with Feefo is that the starting point for the review is a verified purchase,” says Mabbutt. “It’s by invitation. Reviewers can’t contribute unless they are approached to do so, which means it is completely genuine.”

It takes just fifteen seconds for a consumer to engage with Feefo, while the usual feedback approach, whether web or paper-based, attempts to engage them with some kind of survey. Instead of that, Feefo ask two key questions - to rate the service received and the quality of product, with a comment bar under each. “If you go down the multiple question route, the law of diminishing returns will kick in,” says Mabbutt. “You’ll get less information because people begin to tick boxes on a more arbitrary basis as they go through them.” The usual one to ten rating is replaced by four options: excellent, good, poor, bad. “The reason for our approach,” says Mabbutt, “is that it means people cannot sit on the fence. We also provide the option to upload a video or image to accompany the feedback, which is proving popular in today’s mobile savvy world.”

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Telkom South Africa, a fixed line operator which had an issue with fraud, especially relating to international calls, and wanted to be able to predict the problem.

They were sufficiently impressed to contact Neural Technologies. The company didn’t actually have a product then to meet that requirement per se, but was astute enough to realise it could apply its core competence to create Optimus, a system so potent that one telco, at least, was able to make rather than continue to lose money from international calls.

While the system can cost up to $1.5million dollars, a telco can be losing well over $200million dollars a year because of fraud. “I get a little frustrated because in Europe and the USA, no-one wants to talk about how they have suffered fraud and how our company has dealt with it,” says chief commercial officer and deputy executive Luke Taylor. “Their fear is that it will worry investors, perhaps customers,

Challenging, butneed is imperative A quarter of a century or so ago, a group of neural scientists who were captivated by the potential of artificial intelligence decided to set up their own company to see what they could develop. These were the proverbial men in white coats, who took on ad hoc consultancy work to pay the bills.

Five years or so later, they adjusted their focus to apply themselves to create actual products which would have commercial applications, building models to allow a credit card company to take historic data from an applicant and predict the likely ‘risk’ outcome of that individual. For the financial sector, Neural Technologies provide a system which verifies information provided by an applicant. That technology came to the attention of

Luke Taylor, Nueral Technologies

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technology company to make itself stickier with the customer, to offer additional integration services and complementary products which can be taken on,” suggests Taylor. “No matter how good the product, if that’s all it has in the locker, a technology company can become vulnerable as a proverbial one trick pony. Geographically, our growth will come from Africa, South America, and Asia, which are still developing markets for telcos.”

Other opportunities will come from utilities. It is only a matter of time before smart meters become a problem, explains Taylor. And multi-occupier buildings can be a problem for satellite television providers.

“The thing is knowing what line to go down, and then sticking to the plan,” he believes. “A sales enquiry can be intellectually challenging, and people here will love that challenge, but will the resulting work enable us to add to achieve our objectives, or would it take it off into a cul-de-sac?”

Two times agame changerSometimes a game changer happens in the market place and its just what a company needs to exploit its expertise. That happened twice for Staffcare, creators of software which communicate and administer employee benefits.

Originally, some twelve years ago, the company was spun out of a web design business which had seen an emerging need for companies to be able to communicate staff benefits online. Capital was raised from angel investments and then with the arrival of a VC.

It was designing and building websites for financial advisers which prompted chief executive Philip Hollingdale to see the market opportunity. “We just thought we had the ability to develop better tools to do the job,” he recalls. “It started as a background project to be

and tarnish the brand. But in those countries where fraud is overt, a company is more prepared to talk about our involvement because it shows they’re on top of the issue.”

Today Neural Technologies have over 150 people working from offices in the UK, the USA, and Asia. For a while, Taylor tried to outsource work to India. At face value it made a lot of sense; £50k for a software engineer in the UK compared to $20k in India. “But we weren’t large enough to put in the infrastructure,” muses Taylor. “We also struggled to understand cultural issues. For example, ‘yes’ can mean ‘yes, I understand you’ rather than ‘yes, I’ll get straight onto it’.”

He also says that outsourcing can have an impact on the team ethic, which he believes is essential to perpetuate when a technology company is moving forward. “A danger for a growing technology company is that it can begin to develop separate silos,” he warns.

“Another challenge for a private company is turning revenue into cash, so it can get to the point where it can afford to recruit ahead of the workload. That will facilitate growth without burning out its key people. A company can’t continue to step forward if its people are maxed out.”

“We have been more successful in hiring bright, young, capable people with potential rather than those with experience,” explains Taylor. “One of the benefits is that they tend to be dynamic, and absorb knowledge like a sponge because they want to. Our role, and challenge, is to keep them motivated, and for that to happen, as the company grows, the directors need to make an effort to stay visible.

“Is staying where we are an option? That would mean becoming the technology sector equivalent of a corner shop. We could focus on updating products for existing clients, but eventually that will result in a dead end business because clients can be lost simply because they have been acquired.”

Which is why Neural Technologies have been looking at flexing their IP for other markets, including providing companies with the ability to monetise their data. “It’s important for a

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generation doesn’t want to wait for a chap in a grey suit to come and talk to them. They want an Amazon like experience.”

Then an extraordinary fillip - the second game changer. While most employers didn’t exactly welcome pensions auto enrolment with open arms, Staffcare relished the administrative processes it would require. “It was a happy accident that the design of our system meant that we could easily adapt what we had developed,” explains Hollingdale. “We didn’t have to build a system from scratch, while payroll providers and other service providers not only didn’t really understand the new regime, but their software was a back office tool, not employee facing.”

That said, Staffcare were still under some pressure. The new functionality required had to be applied in reverse order to meet the regulatory requirements, and unlike previous updates, it couldn’t be trialled with smaller customers before being rolled out because it was larger businesses which were driving auto-enrolment. Plus, development was having to take place while the regulator was still doing the fine tuning.

“A big challenge for us was finding people with pensions knowledge who could articulate that to software developers to ensure functionality,” explains Hollingdale. “But we didn’t have to devote resources to building sales; channel partners were doing that.”

By now, some of the big brokers were building their own platforms, which they began to offer to the market, but Hollingdale was unfazed: “Our USP is that we provide the technology only, because building effective software is very different from benefits broking and administration which is what they do. No company can be great at everything, I believe in focus; our approach also means we have no conflict of interest.”

To provide some context of the impact of the market changes, it took ten years for Staffcare to get 300 businesses to come on board as customers. In the first eighteen months of auto enrolment that number went up to 6000. Now they have over 12,000 businesses on

honest.” Instead, two years later, the decision was made to sell off the web design business.

The system helps employees appreciate the value of the benefits they are getting, giving them choice through a ‘flex’ program, with the software also producing tax efficient models. “There is a war for talent out there, and for an aspirational company, our product can give them an edge on a larger corporate,” suggests Hollingdale.

“Benefits can be perceived as a given, so they need to be personalised, and engaging. So when a parent with young children logs in, for example, the system can flag up childcare vouchers.”

The strategy was to build the platform on a white label basis which would be sold through IFAs because they had the relationship with corporate clients and tended to deal with employee benefits at the time. “The premise is that we would be selling to people who would readily see the advantage of what we were offering,” says Hollingdale. “It was a question of getting them motivated enough.”

It didn’t quite work out that way. “To influence one of their prospects, they would talk about our software, using it as a door opener,” says Hollingdale, “and then they would go back to doing things the way they always had once the client came on board. We realised we also had to show them how it was a tool to retain their clients.”

Meanwhile, global firms in financial services such as Mercer and Aon which had spotted the market opportunity and had been trying to build their own software, came to Staffcare instead.

But the (first) game changer came with the retail distribution review of financial advisors which resulted in commission erosion. Their income now largely needed to come from fees, and that meant they needed to demonstrate added value to the client.

Re-enter Staffcare. “What it meant is that our system moved from being ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have’,” says Hollingdale. “It enables employees to self educate about their pension for example,. This is such a complex area, which is always changing, and the younger

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Knowing too muchcan be disadvantageWhen you have the lion’s share of a market, relationships with customers are more about working with them rather than selling to them, according to Richard Bobbett, chief executive of Airwave, now a Motorola Aolutions Company. Especially if you are embedded in their daily operations.

Airwave supply mission-critical communication systems to organisations such as the prison service, Highways Agency, Ministry of Defence, RSPCA and overseas governments – as well as the three emergency services.

“What they do can often be a matter of life and death so they have be able to trust us,” says Bobbett. For this reason he likes staff to spend time with customers. “I encourage that, even with admin staff, as it builds relationships. If our staff spend some time in the back of a police car, for example, it helps us understands that customer and the consequences if we get something wrong.”

It would also be tempting to assume that such a close relationship puts Airwave in a more secure position than a conventional business that supplies non-essential services. “True,” says Bobbett, “we’re very close to our direct customers but they aren’t the ones who are paying the bills. I would expect a chief constable to ring me if there’s an issue - but the chief constable isn’t the person who will sign the contract. I can guarantee that the civil servants who do aren’t spending any time in a police car. I’m not being critical but they can be driven more by process than by the context of what needs to be achieved. That can lead to purchasing decisions that don’t necessarily suit the people who use the service.”

The age of ‘austerity’ measures made selling to government is as tough as it has ever been. “It’s all price, price, price,” says Bobbett. “Austerity has been a challenge. Every time there’s a budget cut the Home Office would take another long look at us.”

their platform and three million employees, representing about 10% of the UK working population.

“We can implement our software globally in any language or currency,” says Hollingdale, “and it can be configured to individual jurisdictions. Our database is all about information and rules, rather like an Excel.” The advantage for Staffcare is that they can sell to existing UK partners which have a global footprint, and whose overseas subsidiaries can introduce the product to their clients. Today, Staffcare are also selling directly to multinational companies with a thousand or more staff. The aim is to raise turnover from over £7.5million to £30million in the next four years.

That will require some more victories in the company’s own ‘war for talent’, and Hollingdale believes for that to happen, any technology company has to demonstrate career development. “Every job vacancy we have is always advertised in house first,” he reveals. Though the company isn’t shy to look outside though for specialist input; Imperial College have been involved in product design, and Staffcare have thirty developers in Poland who are contracted exclusively for specific tasks.

In 2013 the company was acquired by The SimplyBiz Group, the largest provider of compliance support and business consultancy services for financial services, legal and workplace benefit advisers in the UK. That enabled early investors to exit.

But that hasn’t resulted in the exit of investment. Work has been taking place to build apps which will make the system mobile-friendly - in fact Staffcare have invested £10million in R&D in the last three years, not just to keep pace with technical changes, but to improve deployment and to make implementation easier.

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services but not in immediate response,” says Bobbett. “Voice is the essential part – it’s vital but often under estimated. If you’re one of fifty officers facing a crowd of 500 people throwing bricks, you need to be able to communicate instantly – you can’t be looking at mobile phones and sending text messages. You need to be told what to do through your headset; it’s voice, it’s now, and with Tetra ,within 300 milliseconds you have the ability to talk.”

And Tetra enables the delivery of voice in a unique way, allowing the device user instant communication not just with the control room on hitting the emergency button but also, at the same time, with colleagues in a group. “If we were having this conversation on mobile phones we’d be using a channel each but Tetra allocates a channel to the conversation, not to the device,” explains Bobbett.

Airwave’s network was used throughout the Strong Tower counter-terrorism drill in London, when the emergency services used the network to communicate with one another and summon urgent assistance. Airwave also took part in the exercise by testing their own business continuity procedures with the deployment of two emergency response vehicles (ERVs).

The network was available to responders both above and below ground, including in the depths of the London Underground (Airwave were contracted to extend their network into the tube following the 7/7 bombing in 2011). Also as a result of 7/7, some twenty Airwave staff underwent police driving training and are now authorised by the Home Office to use blue lights to ensure a quick response in emergencies. “For some engineers the best part of the job is going to the police college at Hendon to learn to drive!” says Bobbett.

Though the focus is on voice and instant communication, the company isn’t ignoring data; it uses broadband for non-critical communications. “We can take away the need for a paper notebook completely for some police forces, creating business efficiencies,” says Bobbett. “The virtual notes are watermarked with date, time and location so they can be used in evidence and the devices can link to other

And ironically, having depth of knowledge in any tender submission can result in a company making itself almost uncompetitive. “We almost know too much,” explains Bobbett. “We understand that the client might need our help to put something right at 3am, but other companies will assume they can turn up at 3pm the next day to fix the problem, and so will be able to under-bid us.”

Competition became more intense when the mobile phone companies began to take an interest in this space. On the other hand, that served to highlight the attributes of the Airwaves proposition.

“Because the mobile operators are used to volume, they perhaps aren’t as geared up for more mission-critical, specialist work, Bobbett suggests. “The current mobile networks are for customers paying £30 a month for something that will work most of the time. Mobile coverage is not 100% reliable. If the communication is along the lines of ‘I’m about to be attacked by a man with a knife’, it’s not much good if it gets there the next day.”

And most mobile services fail within minutes of a power outage, he adds. “When the Orkneys lost power recently they were without phones but the fire and rescue services on Airwave were still live and were then able to help the utility companies.”

Bobbett’s point is that it’s not about the technology but about the business model. “If you phone a mobile phone company you’ll find yourself in a queue; but the nature of our customers means they don’t expect that to happen when they phone us. My challenge to the mobile companies is how do they flex their model for 130,000 police officers out of 22million customers to ensure that their call centre can deal immediately with a PC on her own at 4am trying to deal with a dangerous incident?”

Access have their own network, but he technology is different from other mobile operators, not using 2G or 3G but Tetra, which covers 99% of Great Britain’s landmass. “Everyone talks about broadband and apps, and that all has a part to play in the emergency

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“For a technology company, it’s all about generating ideas, joining things up, integration, looking at how we can make customers better at what they do,” suggests Bobbett.

Identifying thebusiness momentWhat did the Romans ever do for business? Provide the expression carpe diem for one thing, which most accurately translates as ‘pluck the day when it is ripe’. David Webber, managing director of Intelligent Environments provides a more contemporary context. “The technology researchers Gartner had this idea I like,” he explains. “They talked about the business moment, when the right opportunity arrives with exactly the right timing and price-point for the customer to embrace it. And that is the very basis of our organisation, to help companies engaged in financial services to capture the moment as a proposition.”

In practical terms, that means providing a digital platform for them to acquire, inform, engage, and transact with their customers. “They need a complete system of digital engagement,” says Webber. “What that means is, regardless of the device or route people choose, they receive the same tone and same experience, and the system enables them to self serve without speaking to a call centre. We can bridge the gap between legacy systems and the present and future ways of engaging with the customer.”

Integration is the key word here. Apps have a part to play, but in isolation they can part of the problem. “Apps tend to be vertical rather than integrated,” Webber explains. “Technology should make everyone’s life easier. So if a company wants to change content, an FAQ for example, with our system they only have to do it the once regardless of channel.”

Intelligent Environments were the first company to provide the solution for servicing credit cards on the web, which required gaining

data sources, meaning less time has to be spent on paperwork at police stations. Evidence is taken from the kerbside to the court. Our Pronto suite of apps will give the home secretary real cost savings.” Similarly, it enables paramedics to send information on ahead to A&E, enabling for example, consultants to write prescriptions that can dispensed on the spot.

Meanwhile, the company is looking at a number of ways of using the data it collects, says Bobbett. “We handle a huge amount of information – every call , every response , the location of the vehicles and staff. What could we do with that information which could make the UK a safer place?”

If the emergency services were prepared to share the information, Airwave could do various interesting analytics with it. “For example,” says Bobbett, “if an ambulance is on its way to a heart attack but there’s a fire engine at the end of the road with a defibrillator on board, the fire crew could potentially deal with the emergency as they could get there first.”

Data sharing could also offer the opportunity to work across county boundaries. “It could take a crew half an hour to get somewhere but the neighbouring county might be only two streets away. It’s about how can we process that data to improve service quality and reduce costs.”

Airwave can also save time spent on so-called self deployment, where a police officer, for instance, uses their initiative to attend another incident going on nearby. “The officer might be aware of something that the control room doesn’t know about, but on the other hand there might already be five units on the way. So we’re working with control rooms to show them how to manage resources to control situations better.”

Another project involves looking at how footage shot on police body-worn video cameras can be used more efficiently. “At the moment it stays on local devices,” says Bobbett. “The Met has 6000 officers out there on an average day – what’s the point of having 6000 video streams; how can we best use that information?”

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office; it’s a frontline arms race. Engagement is the next big thing and it is happening now,” says Webber. “Often organisations are dragged kicking and screaming by what the customer demands in terms of technology. Sometimes we have to wait for the penny to drop, for them to realise that without digital engagement, it is going to result in a loss of customers and market share. That point will be reached right across the sector; it will. At which point it won’t be a differentiator for a financial services company: it will be the actual basis for doing business.

Things are moving in the right direction for Intelligent Environments, with turnover having moved north of £15million. “Extraordinarily, virtually all of our business has been in the UK,” observes Webber. “It has been all about insuring the platforms are properly in place and our existing market secured.” Looking beyond these shores, Intelligent Environments have been focusing on South Africa, which is in the same timezone as the UK, whose legislation is based on English law, and where there is an emerging middle class with a high take up of mobile devices. That’s in addition to looking across Europe and Asia with their partners.

The biggest challenge though has been the quest for skilled people. “As a technology business a great thing for staff is that we make available all the latest phones and devices, but what we have done is to open an office in Belfast where there is a young demographic workforce,” explains Webber. “While there has always been a movement of young people from Eire to the UK to find work, in Northern Ireland the propensity has been to stay or return. One of the things that drew us there is that the education system in Northern Ireland introduces technology at a very early age - pupils at the age of ten are using Raspberry Pi (the tiny computer which can be used to teach programming). At Queen’s University, degrees are tailored to meet the needs of technology companies. Another advantage is that the retention rate is higher than here in the south east where our head office is based. We hadn’t even considered Northern Ireland as a location which could help us solve our problems, but

global accreditation from the PCI Security Standards Council. To achieve that certification is expensive and time consuming - auditors are in for three weeks every year. But Webber sees that “as a wonderful thing.” He explains: “It is a valuable differentiator, because it says security is hard baked into our DNA. It also ensures that the barrier to entry couldn’t be higher.”

For Webber, who joined four years ago, this is his third technology company role in twenty years. He was brought in to move the trajectory of the sales graph. “The company wasn’t really growing to its potential, even though it has great technology, very capable people and good reference customers,” he explains. “I like to use a formula one team analogy: I see my role as team principal, not the car designer,not the engineer, not the driver, but the person bringing all the necessary elements together and enabling them to work as a team in the most effective way.”

One of the changes he introduced is for Intelligent Environments to take a more consultative approach to sales. “Rather than starting off by going through the product features, it’s important to chat through what we see evolving in the marketplace and how we think it could impact on the potential client’s business,” he says. “After all, we have an own in-house research analyst and a director of strategy. Of course we can’t wait to demonstrate the product, but we need to establish what is of importance to the potential client, where they would see real value. It’s about being well prepared and well researched.”

To emphasise their intellectual rigour and affirm their market leadership credentials, the company set up the Digital Banking Club, which has over 8000 members employed by European Banks, and holds an event in London every quarter.

The development by Intelligent Environments of what they describe as the world’s first Internet of Things banking platform is another example. It informs a bank or credit card customer on a source of their choosing if they are nearing or have breached a self-imposed spending limit.

“In financial services, IT is not about the back

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revenue today, says Daly. “And we couldn’t make the VCs wait that long; we needed to be self-sufficient.”

It was found that the technique had attractive applications outside glucose testing – it could also measure corneal thickness, an alternative to the existing puff test method used by opticians. Subsequent diversifications mean there are now three aspects to the business: diabetes (big potential revenue in the long term); industrial metrology (currently bringing in the most revenue – stable income in the short term); and pharmaceutical kinetics – in other words measuring the progress of drugs in the body (a revenue earner in the medium term).

There are three VC investors: one has been in for ten years; the others since 2009. There are also some med-tech specialist angels. One thing Daly has learned is not to be afraid of investors or the implications of outside finance.

In fact, he says, as a scientist by background (he has a first in physics and a PhD in micro-optics) he welcomed the business expertise they brought, not just the cash. “We had never run a business ourselves; you need to be aware of your limitations,” he explains. “There’s a trade-off as there’s a loss of control and having to discuss and justify things rather than running ahead and potentially making mistakes. But it’s worth being aware of what investors can bring: cash, expertise and contacts and, of course, they know how to structure things and what pitfalls to avoid. Having those grey hairs, so to speak, is very useful.”

What he would advise is getting the valuation and deal structure right before taking on investment. “It’s not necessarily the highest valuation which is best,” he warns. “Investors vary in their timescales. Some want a short-term return and others are prepared to take a longer term approach. We’ve been lucky in that ours aren’t driven by certain timelines; they’re more relaxed, which is good as it allows us the space to be able to create value.”

Which is of particular importance to Lein, because from a marketing perspective, the company’s offerings can be a slow burn. “It’s not a quick sale,” observes Daly. “We have

I got a cold call from their inward investment office.”

Every six months the company holds what it calls a hack-a-thon. “We set aside a couple of days for teams made up from each department,” says Webber. “We feed them on pizza and Red Bull and see what they can create.”

What drives Webber is working in a business which is trying to get the best out of new technology. “It sounds over dramatic to say it, but digital is the new paradigm and it’s dynamic to be at the forefront of it, riding a very exciting curve. It is a real trend. I don’t see big data or SAS as trends. To my mind, they’re enablers, like outsourcing. The only trend that matters is how the customer wants to engage.”

How to discovermore opportunitiesSometimes, the initial concept which led to a business being set up in the first place can evolve quite significantly. Which is why, according to Dan Daly, chief executive of Lein Applied Diagnostics, it’s important that a technology company is open-minded enough to be aware of opportunities to diversify and to be flexible enough to pursue them.

“I don’t want to sound as though the attitude at Lein has been to go with the wind, but strategy shouldn’t be so fixed as to close off new ideas,” he says. “After all, usually companies will start with a technology and then find a market, or they develop a technology to fit a particular market need.”

Lein was founded by Daly in 2003 to develop a non-invasive means of measuring glucose in the eye to diagnose diabetes. The existing medical method involved using a needle. With government funding and venture capital, Lein created prototypes. It became apparent that getting a working machine into clinical trials would take time; had they stuck solely with the original idea the company would still have no

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Moving from development to selling products, going from doing innovative things to locking things down and making them repeatable is a clear change from being very creative. It’s exciting, but I feel a great responsibility.

“What I enjoy most is juggling ten balls at once while keeping things moving forward at the same time, and I like working on supplier and investor relationships, which isn’t something that technology companies are instinctively good at. When I was doing my MBA I learned that people are motivated by achievement, power and money. The power and money are not real drivers for me; it’s doing something that no-one else has done before.”

to get to know the client’s technology team and their commercial and marketing people, so they realise that what we’ve got fits their requirements from a technical, quality and commercial point of view.”

Exports will be important to the their growth. “The UK has a big diabetes problem but it’s small in comparison with other countries like the US, China and Japan, which have big potential,” says Daly. “The US, where we have staff and partners, is our biggest market at the moment, the company has good contacts in India and we’ve been looking to set up a joint venture in China. Up to three years ago, the focus was on R&D, but the patents are in the locker now and it’s more about the commercialisation of our technology.”

That transition has meant that Daly has become more of a full-time manager. “I have been for some time in reality,” he says. “I can’t remember the last time I sat at a lab bench.

Dan Daly, Lein Applied Diagnostics

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The SMEs were in a better position, says Hansford, to deliver more innovative technologies more agilely. “Previous programmes had taken up to ten years to develop and lacked any innovation,” says Hansford. “Historically, government departments would ask for a quotation from the incumbent systems integrator, who would take three months to deliver it, then charged for doing so.”

Add to that the arrival of cloud technology as central to government policy and there was suddenly “an ideal way to shake up the market” in favour of smaller IT businesses. The government’s G Cloud framework, which operates rather like a catalogue, with public sector procurers able to select services from a list, opened up the market to newcomers, says Hansford. “Previously SMEs had to go through a formal tender process that could take years and most wouldn’t even bother.”

So when UKCloud were formed in 2012, with backing from the Business Growth Fund, it was at an opportune time and the company had “absolute belief” that it would succeed. “We had the aim of doing things differently, being fundamentally disruptive, both in the business model and the technology platform, which go hand in hand,” explains Hansford.

UKCloud were also different in having security compliance embedded. “Most companies would do that as an afterthought,” says Hansford, “but on day one, I was employee number one and employee number two was a compliance officer and for the first eighteen months we worked with the front end of GCHQ to make sure the platform was the most highly accredited in the UK. We’re one of only a handful to have the government’s Cyber Essentials Plus standard. Three compliance people spend their time going through checklists. And all of our staff are UK security and DV [developed vetting] cleared.”

The data is held securely in the UK at two military-grade data centres connected by resilient dark fibre [spare optical fibre installed to cater for future growth - effectively back-up]. “Disaster recovery was baked into the product, not added as an extra but embedded,” says

What customers really wantA word to describe reliance on the public sector? Vulnerability maybe? As far as Simon Hansford, chief executive of UKCloud (formerly Skyscape Cloud Services), a more appropriate choice would be opportunity.

“We’re like Amazon Web Services for the public sector,” he explains, likening the company to the remote cloud-computing platform offered by Amazon.com for businesses. The two are similar in being free to join, with customers paying only for what they use.

UKCloud’s slogan is ‘easy to adopt, easy to use, and easy to leave’. There are no set-up fees and no locking customers in to contracts. The service is charged by the hour with online easily accessible billing at any time (unlike Amazon, where bills can only be viewed at the end of the month).

“Customers won’t necessarily save money on the price,” says Hansford, “but the fact that the service is charged by the hour means it can effectively be turned off at night and at the weekends, saving money that way. A website might need only one server at night, for example.”

Which all makes sense, but why the focus on the public sector, which some businesses might see as somewhat risky, given the unpredictability of government policy and diminishing funding.

“Lots of people ask us that,” says Hansford, saying the answer lies in the sheer size of the public sector and that his company’s very success has been down to its public sector focus.

He says the arrival of the previous [coalition] government created a “perfect storm”, albeit in a good way, with ‘austerity’ meaning an increasing number of IT projects were being awarded to SMEs as opposed to the “oligopolies” which previously had 80% of the market.

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including the public sector overseas. “But this is in the future,” he says.

For now, Hansford thinks the IT industry needs to be more customer-centric. “In the past it was us who led the development of technology, but I think if Steve Jobs started up today and said ‘here’s the iPod’, no-one would want one. Sometimes you have to focus on customers and respond to what they want and then create a market for other things. We’re not here for our own edification.”

And a general challenge facing cloud companies is education. “Everyone thinks they know cloud – the reality is that few people really do,” says Hansford. “A lot of workloads are being taken to the cloud and if it doesn’t pan out it’s the cloud’s fault. Putting something in the cloud doesn’t automatically make it work but people with data bottlenecks will go to the cloud in the belief that the cloud itself will suddenly solve their problems.”

Hansford does accept there are possible risks that come with his company’s focus on the public sector. “Governments can change policy and that could stop us in our tracks, or a breach of security could cause reputational damage,” he cedes. Does the worry about that kind of thing keep him awake at night? “Yes it does, it really does,” sighs Hansford. “We’ve done everything we can but we’re in the world of politics and in that world it’s always someone’s fault and we’d be culpable.”

But actually, he has every right to be upbeat about the future. Revenue doubled by the end of the March 2016 financial year (at over £32million) and Hansford says it can reach up to £100million within a couple of years. “I can see the market increasing at least ten-fold,” he explains. “We have the potential to grow into a very big company. We don’t see a glass ceiling.”

And he’s kind of sanguine about possible rivals attempting to ride on UKCloud’s slipstream. “I’m paranoid about the competition and spend a lot of time looking at them, but every business needs competition to keep it vibrant and healthy.”

Hansford. The infrastructure is built around the cloud service models SaaS (software as a service), LaaS (infrastructure as a service), and increasingly PaaS (platform as a service). “All IT companies say they’re cloud providers but very few offer that comprehensive a service,” Hansford suggests.

Another point of difference is that as the business grows it can - and does - pass on cost savings to customers. “We’ve dropped prices seven times in the past three years and every customer has benefited,” explains Hansford. “This is a scale game and if we can get scale we will share the benefits with customers.”

About 80% of customers are central government departments; the rest are local authorities and other public sector organisations such as TfL, Ofgem, HMRC, the police, BBC and universities. That part of the business is growing and will become significantly larger, with predicted growth coming from health, police and defence.

Some 40% - and predicted to rise to 75% – of sales are through partner channels, which ironically means that some of the players in the previous oligopoly, who would otherwise have been competitors, are reselling the UKCloud service.

“To use an analogy,” explains Hansford, “60% of people want to buy water but 40% want a more complex drink such as tea or beer. If I only sell water, they’ll go to the partner with the secret ingredient who can sell the whole solution.”

Hansford sees technology continuing to change rapidly over the next few years. “In the old world an organisation could have numerous servers, each with a role, for instance running the database or website. But in the cloud there are virtual machines, each emulating a particular computer system. The cloud itself will change dramatically. By the time today’s children come into the workforce they probably won’t even use the word cloud; it will be just the way that computing storage is delivered.”

Hansford believes there’s potential to diversify into different vertical markets, such as pharma, and into other regulated markets,

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IT did at the time? We saw it as a chance to get into a niche that no-one else was looking at so we reverse engineered, in a sense, our existing system to adapt it for booking parking spaces rather than holidays.” Holiday Extras remains a customer to this day, which Hughes says bears testament to the efficacy of the software.

Meanwhile, two related trends were occurring: landowners were turning farm land near airports into car parks, and financially squeezed travel agents were looking for more than just holidays to sell. “They often said they would send customers to these newly set up car parks if there was some way of booking them,” says Hughes.

Chauntry Corporation seized the opportunity of taking their car park booking system to a wider market. Hughes recalls driving round every airport in the country looking out for sites which were offering discount parking, as a way to identify potential customers.

A further defining moment came in the late 1990s when the airports themselves, by now seeking non-aviation related commercial opportunities, said, as Hughes puts it: ‘Hang on, these farmers are eating our lunch, why aren’t we offering online parking booking’?

So the airports started to approach Chauntry for booking systems. Parking, Hughes points out, is now the biggest source of income for many airports. The next step was to expand to European airports, where the idea of the consumer being able to pre-book parking was a new concept.

The fact that airports, by and large, are not in direct competition with each other was “hugely helpful”, says Hughes, because it generated a lot of word-of-mouth business. “We couldn’t have achieved what we have without that.”

With many customers so far away and the difficulty of sending IT support staff long distances, Chauntry decided to offer the Parkspace software as a SaaS (software as a service) platform on a privately hosted cloud system.

The significant investment involved, and the fact that this was very early in the development of the cloud (many of the current big players

Reverse engineered into new niche

Pre-book an airport parking space before flying off, and the likelihood is that it will be made through a system enabled by the software of Chauntry Corporation, says managing director Theresa Hughes.

This is a company which has about 80% of the UK airport parking booking market and claims to have “pretty much invented the concept.” And now it’s working on expansion opportunities that could easily double turnover in five years – without even taking into account possible significant growth in the US.

Hughes and her business partner Ray Vaughan came into the airport parking market through a mixture of serendipity and opportunism. Back in 1991 they were working in the travel reservations division of GEC Plessey Telecommunications (GPT) at a time of major change for that company.

“The first Gulf War was about to start,” she recalls. “We were heading into recession and GPT wanted to focus on its core telecoms. We could both see that the writing was on the wall for our division.”

Instead of waiting for the inevitable they took the initiative and offered to buy out the GPT travel business, along with GPT’s obligations to existing customers. The owners quickly agreed and the buy-out was completed just in a matter of weeks.

“It was a great leap of faith for them,” Hughes says of her former employers. “If we had not succeeded, the obligations could have passed back to them. But they were astonishingly pragmatic, and I suppose it was probably a leap of faith on our part too.”

Initially the business focused on supplying software for tour operators’ reservation systems, but it diversified when it took on a new customer who wanted a system which would include airport parking.

“We didn’t know anything about airport parking,” Hughes happily admits, “but who in

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systems are not as sophisticated as ours,” says Hughes. “The US is so big in terms of numbers of airports and people parking at them,” says Hughes. “Within the next couple of years we’ll be in 80% of US airports but what revenue and volume they will generate is a different story. At the moment volumes are quite low. If they decide to adopt the same parking strategy as the rest of the world and incentivise people to book and pay online, they will get the opportunities to increase revenue.”

That said, the model is very scalable, says Hughes. “We process ten million parking bookings a year, and with the potential growth in the US that could very easily become ten times that, without significantly greater costs, as we already have the infrastructure.” The US aside, there is also potential in regions like South America and Asia. Chauntry has started working with Brazil’s largest airport.

Shopping centres and hospitals are also a logical extension and a relatively small step technologically. Then there are options to include non-parking links for airports, such as the booking of business lounges and fast-track boarding passes.

As well as the potential to get involved in airport retail. Links with their parking data could allow airports to identify which passengers are in the airport, or due to pass through it, so that they can market retail offers directly to them. Currently they don’t know this because the passenger deals only with the airline.

All this potential means Chauntry is at an “interesting point,” says Hughes. She doesn’t worry unduly about the economy, pointing out that Chauntry started during a recession. “In many ways I think setting up a business in a recession is a great time. What we do is enable our customers to earn more, and they want to do that whether in a recession or not.

“The economy could potentially affect passenger numbers but we’ve never seen an airport which is operating our system and has experienced a decrease in the number of passengers booking parking.”

It’s the international aspect that excites Hughes most about her job. “It’s amazing to be

had not yet emerged) made the move somewhat of a risk. “There was a degree of nervousness,” says Hughes. “What if we had read it wrong? But I think the timing was right.”

Having a SaaS offering moved the business from the traditional charging model of a one-off licence fee plus maintenance charge to one where it charged per click; again a risk. “Changing to SaaS is effectively a gamble on how much your customers will transact,” says Hughes. “But it was more convenient for the customer and meant lower set-up costs. And we said to them ‘if it doesn’t work - technically or commercially - you don’t have to pay’. That removed any risk for them.”

Even so, Hughes thinks few of them envisaged quite how important pre-booking was going to become, that one day half of the customers at an airport car park would be pre-paying.

Chauntry felt it was important not just to sell the software but also to actively help customers maximise their income from it, by advising on the right pricing model. “It’s much more than just the technology, it’s how they set it up and create a proposition for the consumer,” Hughes explains.

So while some customers might want a simple fixed price tariff, many prefer an airline-style yield pricing model, under which pricing changes according to how many seats are available, the day and time of travel, whether the ticket is bought in advance and so on. Prices are adjusted as needed, to fill as many seats (or car park spaces) as possible, with every empty space viewed as lost revenue.

The US, where the company’s software is already in use at Washington, Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Denver, has big potential as its airports, when tend to be municipally run, are “way behind” those of Europe when it comes to parking technology, and the competition’s current solutions are “very simplistic.”

Yet the sporting arenas in the US are more advanced, which presents a double whammy of opportunities for growth - offering car park booking beyond the traditional airport sector. “Yes, you can book parking when buying tickets to the Pittsburgh Pirates game but the

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take a ten or twenty year view. Resilience is an agent of socio-economic change which is based on a genuine understanding of development and how that can integrated locally and globally.

“If a company is doing something really well the thinking can be why look to change it. But that results in auto-immune coming in and invention and innovation are lost because the company is becoming repetitive. That might be making money now, but there is no resilience in relying on repetition.”

In the last four years, Switch Concepts have increased turnover from £600k to more than £30 million. In 2014 the company was named as the country’s fastest growing technology business.

They provide technology which enables publishers and websites to increase their advertising yield and advertisers to run smarter campaigns. When a user accesses a webpage where an advert would appear, the web server communicates with the Switch Concepts server which in turn supplies a targeted advert based on the highly specific user ID. Information gathered on the user allows adverts to be highly specified, allowing for a very niche target market to be subjected to a certain advert.

Switch manage more than thirty billion advert impressions a month, reaching 80% of the total UK online population.

It all came about after Barnett started producing a directory of ethical businesses from his garden shed. Ethical Junction became a community interest company, and Barnett went on to co-found the Community Interest Company Association. He met co-founders of Switch Concepts, Julian and Jo Spector, the executive chairman and executive vice-chairman respectively, after they set up Natural Collection, on-line sellers of environmentally-friendly products from recycled aluminium foil to bamboo sunglasses. They had also been involved in publishing.

Quirkily, Switch Concepts have an office choir and an in-house bar football league across their two locations. Barnett doesn’t think that is particularly noteworthy. “Is having a focus on making money for the sake of it rewarding?” he

able to travel to the other side of the world and pitch up in a car park somewhere like Hamilton, New Zealand, and find a Chauntry booking system. That still gives me a real buzz.”

What about the longer-term future? “There will be an end game in five or ten years but we haven’t determined what or when,” replies Hughes. “We’ve run this as a small family business and at some point we will want to capitalise on all our hard work. But it will be important to decide what is the best thing for our staff and clients.”

Why resilienceneeds to emerge“What I can see in some technology businesses is that innovation becomes a subset of what they do. Their R&D came up with the concept, and that’s it; they don’t continue looking for new ideas with anything like the same intensity.”

And according to Tom Barnett, chief executive of Switch Concepts, that’s not the basis of building a resilient technology business. “I’m sure there must be a less aggressive analogy but technology is an arms race and innovation has to be seriously continuous,” he says. “There has to be a disciplined approach to innovation because there needs to be an understanding when not to continue to pursue something. In this sector, resilience is about being flexible as well as strong, because technology is heterogeneous rather than homogeneous. What emerges from R&D has to be elegant because if it’s clunky, it will perpetuate misunderstanding.”

Barnett is an advocate of the Bellman equation, named after the American Richard Bellman who created the mathematics-based concept of dynamic programming and optimal control, which demonstrates that any error at stage one will be magnified as the project moves on.

“In business, if philosophy meets pragmatism, what emerges is resilience,” Barnett suggests. “I don’t see why a technology company cannot

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Tom Barnett, Switch Concepts

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Concepts actually share their architecture and philosophy with startups. Barnett also works with the University of Southampton to develop future leaders in technology, and with Solent Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) to “identify the next twenty technology geniuses.”

Threat can befrom withinBusiness owners are all well aware of the threat of faceless hackers and cyber criminals gaining access to their IT systems. But there’s a bigger danger lurking when it comes to data security, and companies actually know the perpetrators.

The real risk can lie with the very staff we trust, says Mike Williams, co-founder and director of Vigilant Applications. “Breaches can come in various forms: staff might accidentally introduce data harvesting malware for example, by inadvertently downloading something they shouldn’t have, or they might just be careless when it comes to data protection policies when they are handling confidential or sensitive information as part of their normal daily routine.”

“Most organisations have the natural inclination to trust their employees or contractors,” says Williams. “But in reality the insider threat accounts for a significant proportion of data misuse incidents, and it’s reported that three-quarters of large organisations have suffered staff-related breaches.

“How readily companies admit it varies, but most organisations understand there’s a sometimes quite significant potential risk that comes from inside and that some of this activity can be deliberate.”

For example, someone who feel at risk of redundancy might decide to download customer data, considering them to be ‘their’ contacts, says Williams. Others might look to access and share information as a favour to a friend or even sell confidential information for personal gain. And, of course, some don’t intend any harm but

counters. “Rowntree wasn’t just about selling as many chocolate bars as possible. It was creating something with resilience rather than a business to flip after three years. If I was going to write a business book it would have the title ‘No Exit’.”

A dip into the past has relevance because it assist the process of looking forward, Barnett avers. “Just because technology is so fast moving it doesn’t mean we can’t benefit by looking at historical reference points,” he maintains. “The builders of the pyramids weren’t thinking along the lines of five years but in perpetuity. By comparison, technology companies are thinking about the next five minutes. I take the point about taking advantage of a window of opportunity, but how can you make decisions about the future of the business, what to do next, if you don’t have a vision?

“You can plan by saying here are the numbers we want to achieve from Q1 to Q4, and these are the KPIs, but without a vision, that’s running a business by keeping score. I like to start by saying ‘this is what we want to do, this is how we can do it’, rather than with the numbers. But I can give you some relevant numbers - our mission is to get everyone being in a position where they apply the top 5% of their skillset 95% of the time.”

Genuinely, Barnett is enthused about technology, that a watch or phone will buzz to say that you can have a free croissant with a coffee at the shop you’re just about to walk past. He’d prefer a more profound example though. “The effect of technology in terms of change is akin to the impact of climate change,” he believes. “It could save the planet by enabling us to better manage resources and reduce waste.”

Permission and empowerment are his watchwords. “You have got to be allowed to fail because it is part of learning,” he says, “and in technology, everyone should be prepared to learn otherwise we are putting a ceiling above us.”

To ensure that the next generation of technology entrepreneurs doesn’t do that, and to encourage their development, Switch

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drive, for example) is in breach of company policy, limiting the functionality available to them or blocking the user completely.

The system is both content and context aware, so can spot if certain key words are used, or certain data types are being accessed. It also enables both prevention and detection of inappropriate user activity, and ultimately that supports the customer’s “financial self-preservation,” as Williams puts it. In most commercial environments it’s about prevention, though in some cases, where employers suspect that something untoward is going on, they can monitor the suspected individuals and through an audit trail build evidence against them - or conversely, and to the individual’s advantage, show that their suspicions were unfounded.

As well as making headway in police, healthcare and financial services (where employers face a “growing headache” over compliance and dissemination of sensitive information) the business is positioning itself to attract other sectors.

One area of big potential is retail. From the core technology of VigilancePro, a specialist retail system, Livestore, has been developed which instead of monitoring corporate computers monitors the point of sale (the till), capturing and reporting transactions in real time. Existing systems tend not to be real time but provide historic information, meaning again, the employer can’t act on problems immediately, says Williams.

“A retailer might want to focus on refund, discount or void transactions, which tend to be a source of fraud,” he explains. “In order to provide a complete understanding of the circumstances in which a transaction took place, the system can be integrated with other in-store technologies, notably CCTV, to show what really happened; for example, when a refund transaction is processed, is the customer actually present and are they receiving the cash?”

The company is backed by private equity investment, and the intention is to double turnover each year for at least the next couple of years. “We’re proving to potential customers

simply fail, through pressure of work, to follow secure data handling procedures.

What Vigilant provide is software that in effect ‘watches’ whatever staff do on computers and other devices. It ‘sees’ what you would if you could lean over an employee’s shoulder all day long, and automatically warns, restricts, or blocks the member of staff whenever their actions might breach security policies. It can also be programmed to make it impossible to carry out certain actions, such as copying and pasting particular types of information from databases, or using the print screen facility to capture and transmit, for example, customer account information as images.

This is called user behaviour management and it’s finding popularity among all kinds of public and private sector bodies that are exposed to the reputational and financial risks of the misuse of sensitive information, IP or business process. They are mainly large organisations, yet as Williams, points out: “It’s harder for a small company to recover from an act of malfeasance.”

Several things make VigilancePro software different, he says. While other protective software tends to monitor the perimeter, as it were, of the network, VigilancePro monitors the “point of greatest vulnerability,” the device itself, the point where an authorised user accesses the system.

Post-encryption, explains Williams, it’s harder for an organisation to understand what’s going in and out of the network, so the idea is to spot problems before that stage, by focusing not so much on the network traffic as on what individual users are doing when they access and process data.

It’s real time too. “There’s a myriad of products out there that will log what’s already happened for auditing purposes, but these typically doesn’t provide the ability to respond intelligently in real time,” says Williams.

VigilancePro can be programmed to take immediate action, which, depending on the circumstances, could include alerting the user that what they’re doing (opening a certain file or transferring information to a USB flash

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consultant to advise them. “That in itself was an interesting process for a company which is a business consultancy (with expertise in security, cryptography and transactions), says McEvoy. “We were hyper critical,” he admits. “It was probably extremely difficult for him; we didn’t give him an easy time. We’re an analytical bunch who analyse everything to the nth degree.”

The process though was of value. “He didn’t necessarily tell us anything we didn’t already know, but he forced us to confront issues and come up with coherent ways of dealing with them so that we could take advantage of opportunities. By being able to test his ideas we were all sure that what came out of the process was absolutely right.”

McEvoy says Consult Hyperion’s attributes lie in them being technically literate. “We are unique in that we live and breathe transaction technology and understand it to a very high level of detail. We don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk. Everything that we do is grounded in real problems, and we have been intimately involved with the development of technology that we use every single day to solve them.”

The priority now is to look at how their knowledge and expertise can be applied to different geographic locations and market sectors, including the more speculative ‘internet of things’, the idea that every household object (lightbulbs and the fridge, for example) has its own internet ‘address’ and can be accessed and controlled remotely.

This new departure from the business’s traditional niche feels “very exciting”, says McEvoy. The key to the development of the internet of things, he says, is security; how to prevent hackers accessing the network that controls the household items and then disabling the security cameras. “How does a machine authenticate that an individual has given permission; how do you make sure that only legitimate entities talk to legitimate entities?”

Ease of use is another issue, and this is tied in with questions over whether the public will really want - or accept - the potential offered by the internet of things. “There are early adopters

that the technology can fly and we’re shaping ourselves to get more business from sectors likely to have high volume requirements,” says Williams.

Pre-existing relationships will help with this: for example having police contacts can influence how other public services perceive Vigilant. That, says Williams, will help to overcome the challenge that any technology business of Vigilant’s size faces: how to gain the confidence of potential customers when it comes to them being prepared to discuss and making decisions about business risks.

“Once we engage with a potential client,” he says, “and we are able to get an organisation to share with us an understanding of the risks they need to address, we can soon convince them of the technology’s applications and value.”

Off-the-shelf canbe way forwardHow can an IT consultancy with a specialism in payment transaction technology double its £6million turnover? By moving to a more off-the-shelf business model.

Traditionally, clients of Consult Hyperion have taken ownership of the IP of software created for them. But occasionally, as chief executive Neil McEvoy explains, the consultancy has been able to either license it to others or use it as part of a ‘tool set’ for different projects.

“We’ve developed some real innovations that tens of millions of people are using and we feel we have not benefited from that as much as we might have,” he says. “Having done a project, we just tended to move on, but now we’re realising there’s still a lot of money which can be made from previous generations . The move to more off the shelf is an evolutionary process rather than revolutionary, but we’re becoming mindful of that way of doing business”.

What Consult Hyperion did which helped to shape their thinking was to bring in a

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taking on computer science sandwich year students and sponsoring PhD research.

Students are given specific briefs to work to which enable Consult Hyperion to assess their capabilities for potential full-time employment – and gives students the chance to find out if they like working there.

Make a differenceon a daily basis“If there’s a philosophy we really believe in, it’s that little things make a difference. An account executive for example won’t simply hand over the warranty form for a customer to complete; they’ll say don’t worry about that, I’ll fill it in for you. There are so many little things like that which you can do on a daily basis; add them up and it results in the customer really feeling you are there for them.”

And Pankai Vekria, managing director of LAN2LAN, the wireless, mobility, IT collaboration, and security business he co-founded, can provide an even smaller example to make his point. “Our business cards have rounded corners so they fit more easily into the wallet without getting crumpled,” he beams.

It was in 1994 that Vekria and three colleagues decided it was time to come out of a city IT services company and go it alone. “We were big hitters in sales but as we became more successful new structures were put in place which were pillaging our accounts,” he recalls. The final straw was then they could see the opportunity for the company to have a consultative arm as well, but the directors weren’t interested.

“When we started on our own, I remember putting in £10K and the first £6000 just disappeared in the rent deposit and legal fees,” says Vekria. “We had one phone and nothing which you could describe as looking like office furniture. We drew a picture of a bridge on a notice board with a fire under it to show that we couldn’t go back, that we were committed

for any technology, and for them, this is not a great leap of imagination,” says McEvoy. “But it all has to be slicker to get mass adoption and that’s happening very slowly.”

In itself, that’s a positive, he believes, as it means this could be a good time for the firm to get involved rather than feeling it has to rush in. What will help the process is the company having its own laboratory, the Hyperlab, whose role is to “bring in technology, take it apart and put it back together again” to see what new services could be offered based on emerging technology.

Which is what Consult Hyperion continue to do in their existing prime market. For their flagship client Transport for London, Consult Hyperion designed a system to allow contactless banks cards to be used instead of existing Oyster cards to access the entry barriers to station platforms. Oyster had proved very successful but was costly to run. Thanks to Consult Hyperion, the public quickly warmed to the idea of paying with their bank cards and some 20% of transactions were made that way within a year, leading to cost savings for TfL. Consult Hyperion has also been working on a further step: projects to enable the use of mobile phones to pay for fares.

When the company worked with the Irish government on ‘smart’ cards for benefit claimants. McEvoy tells how the system paid for itself from the outset simply because when many claimants were invited to attend to have their photos taken for their new cards, they failed to show up. The inference, explains McEvoy, was that a number of them were involved in some kind of scam, perhaps individuals claiming under multiple identities.

Not surprisingly, the main challenge intrinsic for a business whose revenue has come primarily from selling people’s time is finding those of the right calibre and qualifications. As a consequence, one fairly recent measure has been to take on more freelance consultants. This was a gradual change as the management team needed to gain confidence that using freelances wouldn’t lead to quality control issues. The company also has links with Surrey University,

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accountability is completely with us in the UK. “The biggest issue for any company is having the right calibre of people available at the right time. Ten times out of ten, the best are already in good jobs, and unless they have an appetite for change, they aren’t going to move.”

He’s puts particular emphasis on the role of the project manager. “They can make or break a technology business,” Vekria asserts. “Their ability to schedule resource to ensure everything is synchronised, to reduce the number of days required where possible, will have a significant impact on margin. That mustn’t be eroded. At sales meetings we will talk about margin and profit primarily rather than revenue.”

“When a company is growing, people can be under more pressure,” he adds. “But is the additional workload a consequence of a particular spike? We have a mechanism for calculating that. If a spike reaches 133% for three months, then it’s a resource issue which has to be addressed. Of course the decision needs to be made on personal judgement because we’re a people business.

“I’m a Ugandan Asian, and I think that English culture is not so open to what you feel in the heart. I’m not suggesting we should have a hugging culture, but I would like people to feel able and comfortable to talk to me about problems even if they are not work related, rather than just suffering alone. Of course having to carry a problem around is going to have an impact on their demeanour at work.”

And if you think he’s wandered off pragmatic, the statistics show that of the company’s forty or so staff, just over 10% have been in post for over fifteen years; nearly 30% for more than five. “With staff and customers there has to be a partnership based on the heart, not just a contract,” says Vekria. “What I mean is that we can feel it in our hearts if we are letting down a colleague or a customer. I think the CEO should instil behaviours and the managers align that culture with the aims of the business.”

By 2020, turnover at LAN2LAN should be nudging £24million. That is when Vekria thinks existing shareholders will want some form of exit “before they get too old.”

to getting across.” That sense of purpose must have contributed to LAN2LAN being able to post a profit every year for twenty-three years.

At the outset, Vekria says they hedged their bets by focusing on just two areas - IBM Notes (now Domino) and Microsoft, which was beginning to make inroads at that time. That early bet hedging continued to pay off when IBM users began to migrate to the X-Force Exchange, and LAN2LAN found themselves in the role of being a key service provider because of their heritage with IBM and product experience.

The repertoire has broadened as well, with a particular emphasis on security and mobility. And Vekria continues to take a somewhat pragmatic approach: “The cloud? Basically it’s hardware somewhere. Your server is no longer on your premises but somewhere else. What the cloud means though is that I can buy a new laptop in Malaysia and immediately access the software I need there and then.

“And companies will continue to be under tremendous pressure with security because the public take it for granted that they are protecting their personal and medical records. And security issues aren’t made any easier now that most people have at least two devices they will be using.”

To enable remote workers and military personnel to phone home, LAN2LAN created a secure system using specific frequencies and satellites, gaining a £1million a year contract for their efforts. “But,” says Vekria ruefully, “the world is moving too fast for us to really be in a position to commercialise it.”

Migration is another area of activity which has been targeted. “When a company migrates from one platform to another they find, say, of the eighty applications on their system, probably fifty aren’t being used,” suggests Vekria. “But if there are some mission-critical ones which aren’t portable, some development work is going to be necessary to make it happen.”

And LAN2LAN could undertake that in Malta where they have a joint venture and access to sixty developers, all with degrees in maths or science. For the client, says Vekria,

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one percent of oil wells in the world are fibered up. The use of fibre also improves safety, as operators will know accurately when a well is likely to leak or possibly blow.”

A company was acquired in Sweden to help penetrate the energy Industry - just in time for the oil price to slump. “No, the market hasn’t been moving in the way we thought,” says Dr Emslie, “but it has been to our advantage. Because of the price of oil, some nations can no longer afford to work with the multi-nationals, so they are turning to smaller, indigenous service providers which have been setting up, and that has opened up a new market for us.” Fibercore have boosted sales to this sector by 20% in the last year.

Other opportunities, says Dr Emslie, include the use of fiber to sense current changes in the electricity grid, for robotic surgery where fiberoptic sensors will control the pressure applied, and in perimeter security, which means an intruder can’t tunnel under a security fence.

Four Queen’s awards - for sustainability (two), sustainability, and innovation - give Fibercore corporate doyen status in the photonics sector, of which the M3 corridor could be said to constitute a cluster. Photonics is the science and technology of generating, controlling, and detecting photons (particles of light). Photonics underpins the technologies of daily life from smartphones to laptops, from the internet to medical instruments to lighting technology.

Dr Emslie joined Fibercore in 1983, one year after the company was set up. In 1996, it moved into profit and has been there ever since. “The point is we made no money for thirteen years, and I can’t see anyone being prepared to fund a technology company like this anymore,” he says. “And do we really want to rely on temporary madness like a dotcom boom to be the source of technology funding? Technology has been fundamental to the growth of the British economy for 300 years. The position it finds itself in today is a travesty.”

What drives him is that Fibercore continueto develop applications which “make a difference.” Not long after bringing Fibercore

Fundamental part of product offeringDr Chris Emslie remembers reading an independent report on customer service which described it as a fundamental part of the product offering. It had a profound impact.

“I believe that actually, for a technology company to be commercially successful, it requires a consultancy approach to sales,” says the chief executive of Fibercore, “because it means customers experience the value of the technology from the very first contact. It isn’t a transactional sale. The customer never sees a mouth in a suit; it’s about sales people who are technically competent and who know when it is necessary to bring in the heavy lifters.”

The consequence of such an approach? “We asked our customers to rank various aspects of our performance against competitors,” explains Dr Emslie. “We aced customer service, but we also came top in terms of technology against multi-billion dollar corporations such as Corning and OFS.

The speciality fiber made by Fibercore has appeared on Mars, enabling the first gyroscopes carrying the NASA rover mission robots to come down onto the planet’s surface on its wheels. “Volume isn’t the description that the telecom fiber suppliers would apply to our output,” says Dr Emslie. “We are more focused on margin and top line. We identify applications which tend to encompass less than 1% of the overall optical market, applications where performance is mission critically important, and where specifiers will pay over fifty times more than they would for a commodity product.

“We already have an 80% market share in the provision of fiber for gyroscopes, so we have been targeting application areas which have low penetration of fibre in their market. An example is the use of fibre to improve extraction for the oil industry, initially by enabling exploration companies to more accurately work out where the oil is. The use of fibre sensors can improve extraction by up to 40% but only one half of

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The starting point has to be the ability to gain a better understanding of, say, the prospective client you want to communicate with,” says Andrew Yates, chief executive of Artesian, providers of client engagement software. The company has developed a social intelligence app which uses “clever, smart” technology to aggregate tens of thousands of news items from the internet – everything from blog posts to tweets, stock exchange alerts, Experian reports and stories from the national, local and trade press - to produce a feed of insight to users. When a client or prospect finalises a deal or a CEO makes a statement, or its marketing department publishes a new blog for example, users receive notifications.

The result: users gain a solid understanding of their clients and prospects, which enables them to communicate on a fully informed basis. “Knowledge is power,” says Yates. “Having

into profit, he was approached by an executive search company and offered the role of MD elect at a business employing 600 people and with a world monopoly of a medical device component. “The offer on the table was, let’s say, of significance,” Dr Emslie recalls. “Then I realised I was going to make components. How would that get me up in the morning? I’ll be involved in making just one part of a medical product. It may have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but it wasn’t mine.”

Enhancing artof conversationFar from negating the need for human relationships, technology can be used to enhance the old-fashioned art of conversation.

Dr Chris Emslie, Fibercore

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stream on it.”He expands on this. “If you type ‘Barclays’ into Google you get all kinds of sites about premier league football and if you type ‘Monsoon’ or ‘Next’ you get the dictionary definitions. It takes you time to define what you mean by your search and you don’t have that time if you’re on your way to a meeting.”

In effect, sources like Google Alerts, Companies House and business information suppliers like Dun & Bradstreet are complementary to what Artesian can do. “The difference is that, through our search science and filtering, we can put in front of you the one thing that you’re going to find of interest. And that knowledge enables users to look awesome in front of their customers and prospects.”

Those conventional sources, says Yates, are effectively generation one of what’s possible. “Generation two is about providing layers of continual news and insight so in addition to knowing about the customer’s revenue and growth pattern, for example, you get to understand what might be next on their agenda.”

Generation three is about using the insight to boost relationships; for example, there is an option to hit a ‘congratulations’ button when reading about a client’s latest deal or to share the news on Linkedin. “That sort of thing takes seconds but the recipient feels good and will probably hit respond,” says Yates.

Generation four, he goes on, is a measurement tool to tell you how well you’re doing at things like sharing information and contacting customers. “This doesn’t just make you look credible but it also encourages you to do more,” says Yates. “And we’re adding another dimension, influence: for example it tells you if someone else has shared something you’ve published so you can start to understand the influence you’re having.” And generation five is personal productivity tools like a calendar app that supplies information about a company the user is due to meet. The system even integrates with Google and Microsoft Office. “It can tell you where to go, what tube to catch; your customers can even know when you’re in their building. It’s a productivity paradigm so you have all that in one place.”

the latest and most relevant insights about your customers is the most powerful way to start conversations, take control of meetings and close more deals.”

Yates likens it to the old-style insurance agents. “The guy who sold insurance to your grandparents knew them well and often popped round to have a cup of tea with them; he was a trusted adviser. We kind of lost our way with that from the sixties onwards. But with the advent of social technologies and real-time news we have an opportunity to make things like they were.”

The point, says Yates, is that businesses should be engaging with their customers regularly to build and maintain relationships, and Artesian gives them the information they need to do that – and encourages them to keep doing it.

“From our data,” explains Yates, “we can tell you if you’re neglecting a customer, and that perhaps you should talk to them. Or we can tell you a customer is trending in the news - perhaps your customer has fired their CEO, and otherwise you’d probably not find that out until the next day. With Artesian you’ll be the first to know commercially valuable customer news, letting you focus on the best opportunities.”

The system, he says, is easy to use and the information easy to consume and delivered to the devices and at the frequency the user requests. Artesian is user defined so they can turn the volume up or down, points out Yates.

It all comes from publicly available sources of information, Yates adds, but supplied via a “super-smart” aggregation and dissemination technique that analyses and interprets the words around a company and decides whether they’re something the user would want to know about.

So, how does this differ from the sort of information available via existing sources? “Google alerts and LinkedIn posts tend to be general news, much of which is irrelevant,” replies Yates. “You have to read ten things to find the one that’s useful. And Twitter in particular can produce all sorts of nonsense interspersed with the good stuff because few people know how to set up an efficient

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is downloaded by hundreds of people every month. The number of users doubled last year to 25,000, showing the awareness campaign is working. “And many people have used it before, at previous employers,” says Yates, “and that’s created an intrinsic demand whereby they turn up on their first day at a new bank for example and say ‘where’s my Artesian account’?”

Yates recalls in the early days trying to ‘sell’ Artesian as ‘Facebook for business’. “That didn’t go down well,” he says, “as there was a view that Facebook was for kids, so we had to ‘de-social’ the reason, but now the appetite is there for it as a channel through which things get communicated.”

What makes Artesian different? “ We’re fixated on the outcomes, which is unusual. Lots of software companies give you access to a platform but we’re keen to find out how was it for you. For example if a customer’s staff are not engaged with it we’ll provide training so they can get more value out of it,” says Yates, adding that there’s a huge correlation between the amount of time invested in training and the value that companies get out of the system.

“One of the angsts when you’re investing in technologies is that it’s not trendy to go and sit in a classroom; my challenge is to get you to do that, so we bundle education and training into the price.”

The company is SaaS [software as a service] based and produces several upgrades a year. “Why would anyone want to consume software in any other way?” asks Yates. “Who installs software now? You expect to have it squirted from the cloud.” The subscription model, with only a twelfth of yearly income showing on the balance sheet at any one time, can disguise potentially “phenomenal” underlying growth, says Yates, who wants to double turnover year-on-year to £100million in five years. Getting to that stage could herald an exit for him.

“Having worked as a serial entrepreneur I feel my skills lie in starting and scaling a business - and I’d call this a scale-up. Once it gets to £100million plus, the challenges are different and it’s not really my bag; as a leader of a big company you spend your day going from one

With so much technology around there is the challenge of how to convince potential customers that they need a new thing, says Yates. “When you’re in a new space it’s a nascent market with latent pain you don’t realise you have. There are four stages – almost perfect, mild irritation, problems and need to change. I have to get you from feeling like everything’s wonderful to being aware that there’s a different way to spend your time. My pitch would be: why have a Casio watch when you can have Apple?”

Some companies have already taken “the journey from zero to hero”, he concedes. “One banker told me that everything was almost perfect with their technology, there was nothing I could teach him that he didn’t already know, nothing I could give him that he didn’t already have, but he was a rare example of someone who could move at a different velocity with technology.”

So how hard is it to encourage take-up of this kind of thing? Well, says Yates, the system is easy to use for the less technically minded as it provides a stream of information in one place. So those who don’t get round to engaging with Twitter and other channels separately will find this more usable. And those who do engage with all the social media channels will find it a great time-saver.

Basically, says Yates, there are three stages of maturity when it comes to adoption of this kind of technology: listening, interacting and engaging. “My aim in life is not just to have a guy who’s thirtry-three comfortable with it but also to get a guy who’s been in a bank for thirty years, who might not even have a LinkedIn account, ready to embrace the rock and roll. We get people listening and even that might be a big step on from where they were.”

Perceptions of the tool have changed rapidly, says Yates, from a “best-kept secret” to “part of a standard kit bag.” Eighteen months ago it had been successful in only a few very big companies so his objective was to lift the cloak of invisibility with the brand.That was done by syndicating thought leadership through media channels. For example a free e-book

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The main objective for now is to establish Artesian as a leading provider in the UK and then to extend services to the US (first to existing customers who have a presence in the US, then to new customers), where Yates says the market could be worth ten times the existing UK market; then to European countries. There are competitors, mainly on the west coast USA, but they tend to focus only on social, or corporate information. “The way we’re bringing together social, mobile and corporate information is pretty different,” says Yates. Even so, he knows cracking the US market will be a big challenge. “Way too many entrepreneurs think that because the US is big and rich and English speaking it’s a market that’s ripe and there for the taking. It’s not. It’s incredibly expensive to get established and you’re competing against some of the most professional operators. US companies tend to buy from US companies so if you don’t look and feel like a US company you’re at a disadvantage. The US has been the death knell for many a UK start-up so you have to make sure you get it right.”

The possibilities of Artesian are endless, says Yates, and there’s potential to use the technologies for other things, but the focus for now is on company news. “Our preoccupation is not about what the next big thing might be but about the next big thing for this thing [rather than trying to diversify]. There are 20,000 businesses that sell B2B and some of the bigger ones have thousands of people using Artesian. The opportunity to help people in commercial roles is big enough to sustain us.”

How to createreal resonanceHaving a brand is essential for a technology company. It’s the differentiator which should create resonance in the potential customer’s mind. The iconography should stand the test of time, otherwise you will look generic. It should be something that people recognise so that you’re not lost as one of the crowd.

As far as Harry Clarke, founder of Cobalt

conference call and spreadsheet to another and to be honest that’s not what I’m here for. I love classic cars but God didn’t give me these hands to fix engines,” he remarks, making the point that it’s best to stick with what you’re best at rather than trying to be everything to everybody. “Don’t ignore the things you’re not so good at, that you need to get better at, but find what you’re really good at and stick to the knitting,” is his advice to entrepreneurs.

So when in due course someone else takes over at Artesian, Yates sees himself in a new role, helping other entrepreneurs to succeed in the UK tech scene. “Banks are starting to come back and that’s refreshing but it’s incredibly difficult for an early stage business to attract funding,” he observes. “For the vast majority of businesses there’s a huge gap between seed money and Series A finance and then between A and B. It’s like being good at football but never making it to the premier league.”

The Artesian founders were able to attract some “pretty healthy” venture capital, after initially bootstrapping the business with their own money; by starting a consultancy business to subsidise the tech side, they were able to prove to their VC investor that they had customers lined up. The business has had two lots of funding, one in 2012 from Octopus and one this year of £8million from Octopus and Kreos Capital.

The relationship with investors, Yates says, is rather like a marriage. “You have to work hard at it. Make sure there are no surprises, communicate what’s happening now and what’s happening next. If you’re going to have a bad quarter the investors should be the first people to know, not the last. If that conversation is delivered in the right way you can reassure them it won’t happen again.” Relationships with staff are vital too. “If you surround yourself with great people, great things happen,” says Yates. “I know that sounds cheesy and corny but it’s true. You could randomly talk to any of our sixty people about their job and know that they are passionate and really believe they’re making a difference. It’s fulfilling for people to know they’re making a difference.”

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talking to said she was just about to set off from Florida to meet a prospect in Denver. It turned out her journey was longer. Second problem was that phone pay companies in the US tended to be backed by venture capital so we were up against vastly better funded organisations who were interested in market share rather than profit because the funders had the expectation there would be some exit at the end because it was a technology business. Thirdly, US car parks are plentiful, big, and comparatively cheap. The whole experience was useful though as it made us realise that we either had to lead consolidation, be consolidated, or drift over to the sidelines.”

So the company was put up for sale and in 2012 was acquired by Dutch competitor Park Mobile Group. Four years later and although he’s completed his earn-out, Clarke is still here. “That’s because a lot of my DNA is in the business,” he explains. “I am still genuinely excited by where this industry is going,” he says. “Cross-selling could certainly be an opportunity. The system could suggest nearby coffee shops at the end of the parking transaction.”

But his enthusiasm doesn’t extend to prospects for the technology sector per se. “There has been a lot of money looking for somewhere to go in what is a low yield environment,” explains Clarke. “I am stunned by the amount of money following ideas which there is not really a market for. Companies are being acquired when not only have they yet to make a profit, but there is no indication that there ever will. One can only hope that they will build valuable data collection which a purchaser might be able to monetise.”

Clarke though is prepared to question perceived wisdom, as his approach to recruitment demonstrates. “As an army officer I have seen how people react to life-changing opportunities, so I like to recruit people who have inherent capabilities that nobody has empowered them to use,” he says.

A holistic approach, but without any whimsy. Cobalt couldn’t be more methodical. “We write the job description to include who we

Telephone Technologies is concerned, he’s talking about the need to effectively connect up all the wiring. And he makes the point that creating a brand isn’t something a technology company does instead of selling.

“When I talk to someone starting on their entrepreneurial journey, I ask them who is going to be doing the selling. The answer should be them, because nobody else will have that same degree of passion,” he says. “There’s something about the MD of a technology business making a sales call, because the client knows they have it in their power to deliver; they can see it in your eyes.”

What Cobalt do is to enable people to make automated payments, such as paying for parking or council tax for that matter, with the RingGo brand specifically applied to the former.

“We’ve got to the point with RingGo where we have a mature product, 8.6million users a year in the UK, and a system which is wholly resilient 24/7,” observes Clarke. “If drivers are paying for their parking by phone, councils and other operators don’t have to worry about theft from machines, or maintaining them, or actually having them. Nor do they have to send a van out to collect all the coins. From inside the car our technology will find you the parking options, tell you the cost, and then enable you to make payment all without you getting out of the vehicle.”

In 2009 Cobalt felt the time had come to extend its geographical remit, and the USA seemed an obvious choice. “Even though it has been a graveyard for the expansion plans of so many UK companies, there are so many cars in America we thought how difficult could it be for us,” muses Clarke. And arguably they went about it completely the right way by purchasing a parking by phone company out there - for the IT sales people rather than the product offering. But within nine months they had withdrawn.

“There are three mistakes I suppose we made,” observes Clark. “We underestimated just how big the US is. I remember saying to our office there that I was going to be out of contact because I was leaving the UK for a holiday in Morocco. The sales manager I was

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than twenty-five countries have installed systems which collect pressure and flow data from the network, maximise insight from that information, and enable remote control and automatic optimisation. It has helped that the UK water industry is highly regarded internationally, so British personnel tend to be welcomed in other geographies.

Hagan himself could be described as the heavy hitter to move i2O on from being a pre-profit venture capital backed business - the former Arthur Andersen partner was previously CEO of BBC Technology.

He doesn’t describe i2O as technologists though. “Our approach has to be to think about the challenges faced by the client and to take them a solution, rather than presenting a generic technology. My mantra is - what do clients value, and what are they prepared to pay? Identifying the proposition is more important than having intrinsic pride in the product. The reason a company tends to focus on the technology is usually because the founder, who is probably still running the company, invented it.”

Over the last year, i2O have been putting in place a product roadmap, identifying the technology they have on board and filtering it through the company’s mantra. “There can be features of a product which are beautiful, but they compromise commercial prospects if customers don’t appreciate them and don’t want to pay for them,” says Hagan. “I can give you a tiny example. Within the clip mechanism to fix the product to the wall, the design allows a tidy placement of the cable which means it wouldn’t look out of place in your home. It costs only £8, but it isn’t necessary. What matters to the customer is having accurate data reliably provided from a robust device.”

What he’s alluding to is that i2O had a Rolls-Royce reputation, but the product actually needed to be mainstream and widely rather than exclusively deployed. “I want i2O to be everywhere, and as a Rolls-Royce product it won’t be, explains Hagan.

What sets the company apart, he says, is that is understands both the components of

are looking for and why, which is then peer reviewed before we go to the agencies we like and trust,” explains Clarke. “Candidates are interviewed first on the phone, and we invite those we would to meet to our offices.

“They take a maths and an English test and then we ask them to describe in their own words how they would make a cup of tea. While we are reading through their answers, members of our staff will come in to chat to them. The good candidates will have the common courtesy and sense to actually ask who they are. That is followed by the interview proper when we like the candidates to talk about their backgrounds, formative influences; not that there’s any right answer we’ll be looking for, but it provides us with an insight. Each candidate then takes a psychometric test and if they are successful the process culminates in a second interview and a Disclosure and Barring Service check.”

But no matter how good the system might be, it can happen that someone doesn’t work out, or they decide to leave of their own volition. “Then we do all we can to help them swim back to the talent pool,” says Clarke.

The propositioncustomers want“Real success comes when a technology company becomes a solutions company, and for that to happen, from as early as possible the technology has to have a commercial application. IP is interesting and it can attract investment, but in itself doesn’t necessarily make for a good business.”

What does, says Joel Hagan, chief executive of i2O, is a proposition which enables the customer to gain something or achieve things which otherwise wouldn’t be possible.

What i2O do is to enable water utilities to reduce leakage and bursts by up to 40%, add some five years to asset life, and provide a return on investment within twelve months.

In the last decade, 100 utilities in more

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what was historically a platform into products. D-net returns data from the network; O-net controls and optimises pressure in the network; i-net is about taking the data, providing the analytics, and coming up with the decision which needs to be made. “Other systems need technical experts to interpret the data,” observes Hagan.

One area of growing importance is search analytics, and Hagan does his best to provide a layman’s description. “You know the ‘thump’ sound a dishwasher makes when a valve opens and shuts,” he says. “Our technology can identify when percussive events are happening in the water network, so that transients which would otherwise result in reduced asset life can be addressed.”

The point he is making is that the focus is on technology being a means to an end. “Around R&D we have people from the water industry who can articulate the problems which need to

hardware and software and is able to integrate both effectively as a consequence. “We have competitors from the hardware world, but they don’t really understand the problems they are trying to solve - they make devices. We have other competitors who come to the marketplace from a software prospective, but they are relying on others for data knowledge, the hardware.”

A second i2O mantra is ‘trust and respect for people’, which might sound generic until Hagan interjects: “I care very much about the people agenda – a company is a group of people after all and not an entity unto itself.” There’s a third mantra, and that’s everyone in the company should think about cost.

“Why does someone need a mobile phone for personal use and a separate device for work?” he says. “It would be more cost efficient for the company to pay for any business calls using the individual’s phone.” And to make things more cost-efficient for the client, i2O have divided

Joel Hagan, i2O

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he says. Companies were bringing in new technology to try and automate their finance departments, but at the same time they were reducing staff numbers. That meant that while the complexity of the operations was going “through the roof,” there weren’t enough people who knew how to deal with them. “When you get fewer people being asked to do more it means things slip through the cracks,” says Griffiths. Fraud and compliance problems were rife, along with issues such as over-payments not being spotted.

Enter FISCAL Technologies, whose AP Forensics software today sits alongside a company’s accounting systems and analyses what goes in and out, identifying risky transactions. Back in 2007, Griffiths gave up his job as head of European marketing at Bottomline Technologies to buy the business.

“At the time it was being run by tech people who didn’t understand a company’s finance function,” he says. “Many people would have said I was insane giving up a really well paid job, but I could immediately see the potential. It had a really good proposition and I really understand the customer base. We saw an improvement almost immediately.”

Having inherited one developer, Griffiths invested in sales and marketing and an in-house development team of “super-bright” coders. Their work led to what is today FISCAL’s AP Forensics enterprise suite, which analyses accounts payable transactions, master supplier files and VAT entries to identify errors and anomalies, so reducing overpayments and fraud. It works alongside any accounting system and has been used to protect hundreds of millions of transactions across the globe.

In the second year turnover was £250,000 and Griffiths could pay himself some money, which was a relief with his first baby on the way. It has grown by a total of 500% in the five years to 2013, with turnover now over £4million. That earned the company a place in a fast-track growth ranking. Actually, Griffiths wasn’t too surprised. “I’m an optimist, so I expected high growth,” he says. “Not that it was easy. Success is about more than the technology. It’s the

be solved, and that translates into something that R&D can deliver against,” says Hagan. “Then we need people who can articulate the solutions to business problems clearly so it can be communicated to a higher level at the potential client company.”

“Water is fundamental to life, and the challenges are global,” he explains. “The population is growing at an extraordinary rate which itself is increasing. Then factor in extreme weather events, and the supply of water becomes even more problematic. Our aspiration should be making an even more significant impact in solving the world’s water problems. To do so and be commercially successful at the same time requires patience. The water industry is conservative and relatively slow moving.”

And of course there’s the patience of the current investors to factor in. All i2O can do is to continue to demonstrate progress.

Ambition to make adifference achieved

Buying a company that is on its knees might not be everyone’s idea of what to do with their hard earned cash. David Griffiths cheerfully did just that. But his confidence in the potential of FISCAL Technologies, the accounts payable forensics business he acquired in 2007 ,has been proven right.

And in the process he’s achieved an ambition of “making a difference” by “tooting the horn for the software development industry in the UK” with the company’s accounts payable software.

Coming from an accounts payable background – he has a degree in business and accounting - Griffiths’ is “passionate” about the subject and going back nine years or so, he was in a good position to recognise the potential being created by “massive” changes in the accounts payable industry.

Two conflicting things were happening,

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proposition is strong enough to go head-to-head with the largest organisations in the world. Indeed, he cites a West Country local authority as a case in point. “They were approached by a global software giant which just wasn’t able to replicate what we were doing, even though they spent a lot of money trying, so the customer decided to go with us.”

In any event, the market’s big enough for everyone, he adds, although there is a lot of indirect competition vying for the same budget. Griffiths’ target is for FISCAL to be recognised as the benchmark, globally.

A partnership with Reading University’s analytics team will support that goal, and, he says, could lead to “a great fusion of opinion and advanced data mining.” The result could be some interesting advances in the software.

More than justconvenienceImagine driving down the M4 when something begins to go horribly wrong with the car. You won’t realise until it actually breaks down fifty miles later, causing huge inconvenience and stress. Wouldn’t it be nice though if your car could tell you it’s feeling poorly, then direct you to the nearest dealership that has the correct parts available, so the problem can be fixed straight away?

“In the past it was the driver who had to engage with the car. Increasingly it will be the vehicle telling the driver there could be a problem,” says Neil Packham, UK managing director of CDK Global, which supplies software and hardware for car dealerships. “A typical scenario would be that you get a text from your car saying that its oil pump is about to fail. Meanwhile, the car identifies the nearest dealership which has an oil pump in stock and will direct you there via satnav.”

All this comes under an area of IT called telematics, in which CDK are actively involved

proposition, the team, how you connect with the customer.”

FISCAL now have more than 250 customers based in the UK, US, Canada, Europe and India, including names such as KFC, Argos, Mothercare, Debenhams, dozens of NHS Trusts and a hundred or so local authorities including half of the London boroughs. Longer term, Griffiths would like FISCAL to command £50million worth of the whole market, which is worth in excess of £600million.

He’s conscious that the business might need some “rocket fuel” to keep the rate of growth up, but he’d be reluctant to consider private equity finance. “We could easily get up to £4million in private equity, I’m being offered it all the time, but I’ve seen too many companies destroyed by it,” he says. “So I’ll always prefer to grow organically, perhaps looking to bank loans if we need more cash.”

Griffiths is conscious of the fact that rapid growth can put stress on the staff – though that can be an exciting kind of stress. The key thing, he adds, is keeping people engaged. With this in mind he has hired a ‘people and culture manager’ rather than the more usual ‘HR’ post.

Exports make up about 20% of the business and Griffiths says they are likely to grow to 30%. The United States is a key target, and FISCAL now have a wholly owned US subsidiary that employs five people. It’s expected to double in size soon.

Like any SaaS-based business, FISCAL are subject to the whims of subscribers, but Griffiths says that last year’s performance was better than their 90% retention target. Knowing customers can move away, says Griffiths, naturally engenders a higher level of customer service. “The function known in most companies as customer services is called customer success at FISCAL,” he points out. “If the customer keeps achieving success with our product they will renew in three years. We’re always thinking about the long term.”

Is there any danger of a copy-cat product emerging? “That’s very unlikely,” declares Griffiths with confidence. “They could copy elements of our technologies but our

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more holistic approach, integrating the data so there was “one view of the truth rather than islands of data.” What enabled them to do this was bringing on board knowledge as a consequence of a series of strategic acquisitions since the company was launched in 1972 as ADP Dealer Services, then providing account and inventory services to auto dealers. In 2014, what is now CDK Global was spun out on its own. The ‘C’ stands for Cobalt, the digital marketing and dealer website side; ‘D’ stands for dealer services, the original business; ‘K’ stands for Kerridge, the computing and data business which was bought in 2005.

The digital marketing arm, Cobalt, helps dealerships to understand and track their customers’ propensity to purchase. “If existing customers are looking online or engaging with Adwords you know they’re interested in buying something and you can better engage with them to provide them with the best possible shopping experience,” says Packham.

Other clever things the system can do include identifying when the owner reaches equity parity with their car (meaning the point at which sufficient of their finance has been paid off so they are in positive equity given the value of the vehicle). By making contact at that juncture, the dealership can engage with them about buying a newer model.

“The challenge is to get the right mechanism to have that conversation,” says Packham, “how you track the emails and responses and move the customers to accept the offer and make it a seamless experience”.

Another, is getting the amount of contact right for the individual. “Mrs Smith who has bought Fiestas for fifteen years doesn’t need a test drive – she just wants to know what’s her old one worth and how much a replacement will cost. But if she’s been driving a different model and is thinking about a Fiesta, absolutely she needs a test drive.”

Along the way, CDK Global have been repositioning themselves more as a consultant than purely being a software supplier. “That’s a key point of difference for any technology company,” observes Packham. “We’ve

“Cars can already tell the driver they need a service so the idea of them diagnosing their own faults and arranging for repairs is just a further step,” suggests Packham. Telematics has other uses too. “If I had a seventeen-year-old son who had just bought a car,” says Packham by way of example, “I might want to know where he is. I could set an alarm to tell me if he had driven more than twenty miles from home.”

Packham says telematics can make things much more convenient. “I expect you’ve taken the car in for a service and been told it needs a new air filter only that the dealership doesn’t have one in stock. Telematics overcomes that by interrogating the dealer’s system to make sure that the required items are available so you don’t have to make a repeat visit.” He gives another example. “I was in Dubai, at the largest shopping centre in the world, in the largest car park in the world, and there was a bunch of people employed just to help customers find their cars. Telematics means you can always find your car.”

Of course, for this kind of thing to really take off, drivers must be comfortable with sharing their location data. Packham points out that many of us can already be tracked via our mobile phones, though he suspects some people don’t realise that. “There needs to be an open conversation about this,” says Packham. “The industry has to be open and say that telematics will mean someone can always know where you are, but that the lifestyle benefits outweigh that.” Telematics is a key part of fundamental changes in the way people interact with car dealers, says Packham. “It’s important for us to be at the forefront of that.” Not least because developments like telematics will help CDK Global, which serves 27,000 car, truck, motorcycle, marine and heavy equipment dealerships in 100+ countries on six continents, achieve their aim of double digit or triple digit growth each year.

The vision is to transform how cars, trucks and vehicles of all kinds are marketed, sold and serviced. While dealer management systems and customer relationship management tended to function as separate entities, CDK took a

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car but now many go only once, having done much of their research online.

The core product can be customised to make it country specific (to meet different legal and fiscal requirements) or to make it manufacturer or dealer specific (some requirements being more relevant to a particular brand).

The complexity comes in the way it’s “stitched together” to make it work for the particular customer, says Packham. “The technology itself is reasonably simple. In the past everyone wanted to build their own software in proprietary language but now, rather than building their own databases, most customers use Oracle because everyone understands it and it makes sense to use a database that can be used to do other things with.”

Being close to the customer means a technology company can be predictive rather than reactive in terms of what it does next. CDK Global have been looking at what the retail automotive sector cutely refers to as ‘mobility’. “It can mean various things,” says Packham. “Traditionally someone would drive to the dealership, find somewhere to park, and then walk up to the service desk and wait. Then they’ll be asked questions that actually the dealership knows the answers to already. Now software enables a representative of the dealership to meet you as you drive up so you can be on your way quickly,” says Packham. “That’s one sense of mobility. Another is that some customers aren’t interested in owning a car; they want one when they need one. That’s front and centre of the industry’s focus, with some manufacturers actively engaged in working with or acquiring car sharing services.”

Packham says a challenge for a technology company is to evolve its thinking but at the same time retaining the culture which has given it a loyal customer (and staff) base. “You don’t want to break that core DNA, but if you do the same thing for the next fifteen years,the business will wither and die of irrelevance,” he says. With this in mind he has brought in people from other industries, such as medical software.The Nasdaq-quoted company now has two main priorities: penetrating the retail automotive

historically been perceived as providing a good product and service but from the position of being a vendor. By repositioning as a long-term strategic partner, as business consultants rather than software writers, understanding customers’ challenges and issues and having open dialogue, we can work together to find solutions to make customers more effective and efficient. And that means they’re less likely to want to go elsewhere.”

Indeed, Packham thinks that technology businesses gain success not so much from their technology per se as from how close they are to customers and how much value they are seen to offer. “I don’t want us to be seen as being good at one thing, but as being a valued partner,” he says.

Although CDK Global have chosen a strategy to be “the one-stop shop for automotive IT,” could there be applications in other types of retail? Absolutely, says Packham. “This would work anywhere that has customers, stock and a requirement for accounts. We do have customers already which don’t fit the corporate demographic - such as a yacht sales business.

“The focus for a technology company is on helping customers have more effective relationships with their customers. For example, when it comes to booking a service, traditionally a form would be filled in online, and then someone from the dealership would ring to arrange it. Now the system allows you to book completely online – it has access to workshop diaries so it knows when the technician you need will be available and if a courtesy car will be available for that time. I don’t believe that consumers want to have to speak to a service receptionist, just like no-one wants to speak to a travel agent when they’re booking flights.”

But where there is a human interface it’s important to synchronise it with the online aspect. Packham says that some motor manufacturers enable customers to configure their dream car online but then make them do it again from scratch at the showroom. He explains that people traditionally visited a dealership at least five times before buying a

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they speak to a human being. We will advise them on what other products they might like to consider which would complement their purchase. If we are asked to quote on 500 laptop bags we’ll talk to the customer about whether they need to add a detachable mouse for example. Of course it means we then have the opportunity to attach more to the sale, but our approach gives the customer options and alternatives.

“And think about your personal shopping experience. Usually, only when something goes wrong is there a lasting effect on your perception of the company you’ve bought from. How that company puts something right will determine whether their reputation stays intact. Your approach to customer service should create a lasting perception more often and from a positive starting position.”

Meanwhile, Denness is happy that Hypertec are of a size which means that even with 900 resellers to manage, the team can pick up the phone and make as well as receive calls. “And I like to get out to see customers at their premises rather than talk to them from the safety of an office,” she says. Not that she has one herself. She works from a desk on the sales floor.

“I don’t know whether it’s a factor of having this approach,” says Denness, “but 70% of our fifty plus staff have been here for more than five years, and that means we have been able to develop a culture which is ingrained. With this kind of continuity, new employees coming into the company will be able to experience straight away how we work. It means when I go on holiday, I know people here will continue to do the right thing.”

Underpinning that is the bonus scheme which includes virtually every member of staff. It pays out on a monthly basis, based on the budgeted profit figure. “If it isn’t achieved, then there is a collective will to work out why that was the case in a positive way to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” explains Denness, who is anxious that she isn’t giving the impression that Hypertec is a “weird holistic place where everyone has a group hug on a Friday.”

“We are here to make money,” she says, “and

market further with its redeveloped core product; and increasing its speed to market. “Being able to adapt and change quickly once we’re in is important,” says Packham. “Because then it’s about how to identify and access opportunities.”

Value propositionneeds appreciation“The trouble with the technology sector,” says Lianne Denness, managing director of Hypertec, “is that we create fabulous new products, then discount the hell out of them because the market is moving so quickly.

“In our home lives, plasma televisions are now a twentieth of the price when they were launched. So for the sales team at a technology company, it is essential that it is understood that the minimum price is cost plus x. It is also essential the sales team knows that figure is not actually the starting point. We have had to walk away from business which would have been unprofitable, and I don’t believe in the sprat to catch a mackerel theory. Why? Because that would set the benchmark in terms of pricing and it isn’t the way to establish a relationship if you want it to be based on the customer appreciating your value proposition.”

“Our core product is memory,” she explains, “which elongates the performance of servers and PCs, and provides an alternative to investing in completely new kit. Memory is a volatile commodity but we are small and agile enough to react. If the price drops we aren’t holding large amounts of highly expensive stock.”

“We exist in a strange place, in a market where giants such as Tech Data, and Ingrams, are omnipresent. They are extremely good at logistics but my personal belief is that our size means we have a better ability to offer pre-sales support because their structure isn’t designed to provide it. We can look at this at a very simple level. Callers to Hypertec don’t get voice mail;

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could be described as a business tourist approach. “There is an arrogance,” she says, “in that UK companies go to mainland Europe and expect meetings to be conducted in English. If we take the trouble to appoint a native speaker in a particular country, it means we are going to be better placed to emulate the success we have had with a group company in the UK.”

“I’m a born optimist,” she continues. “I take the view that if we were left with a single competitor, that means there is still headroom in the marketplace, and opportunity. So although we are looking at mainland Europe, there is still huge opportunity in the UK because there are plenty of resellers who haven’t yet taken our products.”

The way to createfantastic solutionsThe core attribute of a technology-based business? It’s not the actual technology per se, but what it enables the customer to do, according to Sean Taylor, founder and managing director of Redwood Technologies, the company which enables organisations to improve and integrate their communication systems.

And that requires committed people, he says, “because it’s the human capital which creates fantastic solutions. When I started we worked over ninety hours a week and I still put in a pretty good shift; you have to make it happen. The more effort you put it, the more you get out.”

Today there are about 150 staff at the company, with 80% being graduates, mostly from Oxbridge and Russell Group universities, and Taylor says the work ethic has been maintained. So what does he look for in his staff, apart from the willingness to put in the hours? “We don’t want average and we’re not even after good,” he says. “We want great – that’s the only way to build a great business. We want versatile, smart, committed people with a

no company should be ashamed to say that. One thing that having private equity investment has taught me is that at the end of the day, that’s what we are here to do otherwise we won’t be here tomorrow.”

There’s been consolidation in Hypertec’s sector, and Denness is sanguine about the future intentions of the dominant players in the IT supply chain. “Consolidation is either an opportunity or a threat,” she suggests. “If you are a smaller company in the marketplace it means that a large competitor can do you damage if they wanted to. Being a small fish in a big pond carries that risk, but if you are really doing a good job, that makes you an attractive proposition to a consolidator as well as to the customer.”

The company has been single-minded about diversification, if that’s not counter-intuitive. “We are looking at ways in which we can capitalise on our relationships with existing customers,” explains Denness, “providing them with complementary products such as hard drives and other storage.” Indeed, Hypertec made an acquisition to help make that happen.

Niche thinking led Hypertec to add other brands to their portfolio, products which weren’t that high profile in their manufacturer’s portfolio. So for example, the company has become the largest distributor in Europe for IT privacy devices made by 3M.

Turn the clock back eighteen years and Hypertec were also engaged in local manufacturing. “That stopped because we realised we were better at sourcing product, and because the cost of manufacturing is so high compared to others who are doing it in much greater volume,” Denness explains. “We import from Europe, the US, and Taiwan, buy in dollars and euros, which has real implications for pricing.”

That said, the UK accounts for 90% of turnover, although ‘at the moment’ would be an appropriate caveat to add. “The springboard to increase sales overseas is our relationship with UK customers which have sister companies elsewhere in Europe,”says Denness.

But she doesn’t intend to engage in what

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sentences about themselves to identify their potential weaknesses – such as ‘people would say my faults are…’. Taylor comments: “High flyers might be selfish or shirk responsibility, or be lazy and do a shoddy job and shift the blame to someone else - or on the positive side be motivational and outcome driven. But you’d be amazed at how many people say nothing when asked the question,” he adds, confessing to a fault of his own: the tendency to “nag and badger.”

Only one in five interviewed are offered a job. Taylor says the recruitment process is massively time consuming but necessary.

He admits he’s one of those people who gets bored easily so he thrives on varied activity. “Not every day is a good day, or every week a good week, but if you enjoy what you do, you can look back and say wow, we’ve done some good stuff, we’ve made progress.” And

high degree of application, who don’t just want a nine-to-five job to pay the mortgage.”

And, he says, while having technical skills, they also need the ability to apply them to business outcomes. “We have to be able to make or save money for customers, make their lives easier, help them to provide their customers with better service,” he explains. “That’s nothing which is particularly different or unusual – every company will tell you their people produce benefit for their customers. But the devil’s in the detail. I want people who are motivated to react if a customer rings at 5.30pm and says they want something that’s going to take three hours to do.”

To ensure Redwood Technologies get the right people, applicants who reach the face-to-face interview stage will go through various tests – though not of the conventional variety. For example, they might be asked to complete

Sean Taylor, Redwood Technologies

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pick a small number of winners and we want to be one of them.”

He believes it’s an imperative that a technology company attracts the right investor. “We spent six years building up [sister company] Content Guru and there are not many investors who would give you that amount of time,” he suggests. “The ideal investor would stick to their knitting and let the operational guys get on with theirs.” Some of the growth capital, when it comes, will be spent on acquisitions. “That’s an inefficient way to grow,” observes Taylor, “but it saves time.”

For a technology company, the “massive weak spot”, he says, tends to be marketing. “Getting the brand out there is vital. Customers should come to us instead of discovering us at trade shows or through referrals.”

Second bubble should be realIs the much talked-about second technology bubble real? John Thompson, with many years of experience in IT start-ups, thinks it is. But that’s not to say there isn’t a degree of over-hyping.

“I think we are we in the second bubble,” he comments. “There’s a big debate as to whether the bubble is real. I think it is. The cloud is awesome; a game changer. Valuations are hotting up and capital’s getting more plentiful. Raising funds is now just really hard as opposed to almost impossible,” he adds wrily. Thompson is chief executive of UserReplay, supplier of digital customer experience management (CEM) software, which gives insight into what e-commerce customers experience when visiting websites. Users are primarily in travel and financial services (which typically have high value and complicated customer journeys often involving third party interfaces) and general retail. Continuing the theme of tech business valuations getting higher, he adds: “I was talking to a guy in Silicon Valley who said

the business certainly is. “The big worry is the organisational challenge of getting from £30million to £300million-400million (the aim for the next five years).” That’s a big target but he believes it can be done. “It’s absolutely realistic. But how do we perpetuate agile cohesion in an organisation which has grown to hundreds of colleagues? ”

Taylor recalls working for a previous company where growth slowed down as the message got diluted, and says he loses sleep over the fear of that happening at Redwood. He found the book Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal very relevant in this regard. McChrystal’s approach in Iraq was to combine transparent communication with decentralised decision-making authority, giving small groups the freedom to experiment while encouraging everyone to share what they learn across the entire organisation.

The company is already strong in several export markets including Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany, and now Taylor is on a mission to bulk up the German and US teams and have a presence in Paris, Italy and Hong Kong.

“We have to continue to be enthusiastic and keen,” says Taylor. “I don’t want to be a train spotting bore but I love to meet customers, and I find their challenges fascinating. We can turn something around within a week that competitors would take six months to do. That’s absolutely an important asset for a technology company, the speed at which it can react.”

The more pressing issue with global expansion is finance. “We’re cash generative and profitable and turnover goes up by a factor of ten every three years,” says Taylor. “We could get to a certain level but we can’t scale it enough without growth capital. We have the financial ability to set up two offices but we have the opportunities to set up six.”

With those financial challenges in mind he’s been courting funding sources and believes there’s money out there to “put fertiliser in the soil”. He says: “Companies like us are getting the most unbelievable valuations. That’s great but you know that eventually the market will

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he’d have given up trying and gone to another website, like most people tend to do when confronted with similar frustrations early on in the buying process.

“That sort of situation is why we exist,” says Thompson. “Our mission is to help companies not lose that business and to help shoppers to buy the things they want.”

Only a small percentage of shoppers will actually contact the retailer to report a problem, says Thompson. Most will simply go and shop somewhere else, especially if the problem occurs early in the shopping process. And once they’ve gone, a customer is often lost for ever, he says, as having made their purchase at another store they will continue to shop there in future.

The data recorded by UserReplay’s software is comprehensive, he says, “but the clever bit is the analytics, identifying the point in the buying process where users struggle and identifying why, so that the retailers can fix the issues. The software means the retailer can analyse the ‘sub-optimal journeys’, and not just find out what went wrong but, by looking at basket values and conversion rates, also work out the cost of the issue.”

One challenge for website owners is ‘replication’ – making a particular problem happen again so they can work out what went wrong and fix it. “Replication is the bane of software developers’ lives,” says Thompson. “An issue might have affected only a small percentage of shoppers, and might not happen to the developer who’s been notified about it, as it might occur only on a particular server or at a particular time of day.” UserReplay’s software records the problem when it happens which removes the need to replicate.

Thompson likens this to when the warning light comes on in your car and you take it to the garage and they can’t find anything wrong with it. “An intermittent problem is a bad problem because you need to recreate the circumstances. A massive part of bug testing is getting the problem to happen again. Website analysis is common but we specialise in recording the whole journey and that’s something only

$10billion was the new $1billion. The number of new companies reaching $1billon valuations have gone up hugely. There’s been a massive creation of genuine value.”

But Thompson adds a note of caution. “That’s not to say it’s not over-hyped. Is every share price worth it? I don’t think so. There could be a painful correction for a lot of companies. Some of these unicorns might fall over and that would send a big ripple all the way from Silicon Valley. The massive e-commerce market is growing by 20% a year globally and the technology that enables it is growing even faster. The e-commerce tide is rising and all boats will rise on a rising tide.”

Including UserReplay. Their software enables e-commerce companies to analyse their customers’ website journeys so they can find out the reasons why a customer loses interest and leaves a website. For example, about two per cent of website users might be asked to re-enter their passwords, having already done so, says Thompson. This might sound a small percentage, but it can translate into a far bigger drop in ‘conversion’ rates – the number of website visitors who proceed to complete a purchase. So UserReplay aims to identify, diagnose and fix barriers to conversion.

Make the purchaser’s buying experience hassle-free and they will come back, is the theory. Conversely, if a website is slow or it asks you to supply information multiple times it can be frustrating or even enraging, as Thompson knows from personal experience.

“I was booking a holiday in Norway and I have five kids so it was quite complicated. I had to book a minibus, get the right flights and order skis and snowboards. I was on that site for two hours, then I pressed ‘buy’ and up came a message in Norwegian that meant my cookie settings were wrong. Then the accommodation I wanted wasn’t available, and I wasn’t sure if the payment had been taken. So I phoned up and got a voice message in Norwegian.”

Thompson got his holiday sorted out in the end, but as he points out, he only persisted because he had invested so much time already in the process. Had he been trying to buy a shirt

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you because your interests are fundamentally aligned.

“They say it’s like a marriage; getting a divorce is extremely expensive and everyone ends up with losing something. Choose who you will get into bed with and don’t just do it because they’re waving money about. Do your due diligence as well; if they’re a good investor they won’t mind that.”

Ironically, given that access to funds is easier, it’s never been harder to get talent, says Thompson. “For good software developers the unemployment rate is zero. It’s expensive to get good people and we’re fussy.”

He’d rather hold out to get his first choice than compromise, he explains. “We’ve always hung on for the A team and that can be frustrating as there’s work you want to be getting on with. It’s tempting to hire the B team because they’re available, but if you hire the B team they will hire the C team.”

One obvious challenge is to keep up with the fast-moving underlying technologies. “We have to make sure we’re compatible with the ever-expanding website and on-premises world. It’s up to software houses to do the innovation, not wait for customers to think of something first,” says Thompson, making the point that until a customer knows a technology exists they’re unlikely to ask for it.

“Profound innovation means we can say to customers ‘here’s something we can do better’. At the same time it’s important to get the right balance between innovation, out-of-the-box thinking, and commercial mindedness.”

Having been through a growth curve a number of times (he has held CEO, MD and non-executive board positions in six successful technology companies), Thompson says his job becomes increasingly about how people interact and work together, and having the right people to support the top team.

“When I had six people I did stuff. In my last job I had 400 people so all I did was go to meetings. Now, with less than thirty people, I’m in the challenging and interesting player-manager phase. With 400 people it’s all about your judgement; as player-manager you have

a minority do. For retailers we’re a bit like a CCTV camera but we record an electronic journey rather than a visual image.”

Unusually for a software provider, User Replay offer both SaaS (subscription - and cloud-based) and a version that is installed on the customer’s own premises. People-wise, the business has doubled the number of staff to more than forty and has trebled the number of countries it operates in. In 2015 User Replay opened a US office and did their first deal in France.

Last year turnover grew by 220% and the target is to double it every year for five years. Thompson points to the difficulty in building a great software company by bootstrapping it yourself. “If you do that, someone else will raise money and kill you off.”

He is grateful to the government for its support of the tech sector through beneficial tax treatments, support of VC schemes and the EIS and a grant from Innovate UK. “I’ve been in early stage software for fifteen years and the investment cycle has never been better supported by government,” he says. “Across these funds User Replay’s biggest single backer is the UK government.”

The initial funders were tech-focused business angels. Four venture capital firms (Longwall Ventures, Episode 1, EC1 Capital and FSE Group) have invested more recently, including a £3million injection in 2016.

Thompson has no problem with having to report to investors. “The idea of an entrepreneur keeping complete control is unusual in this sector; I’ve always worked with VC investors so I’m used to it, and investors with their networks and experience can be a great source of counsel and advice.”

Thompson himself came in to join Phil Smith, who set up the business in 2009, as part of an investment so he understands the investors’ perspective. “If you pick a good investor they will back you on your journey. They understand that early stage technology is not straightforward and they’re very supportive. They have to protect their interests, but tell them the bad news and they will want to help

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can’t go on forever and a day reselling what they have, or to put it another way, not being masters of their own destiny,” says Gregory, now chief executive at LYNQ.

“What we decided to do was to start with as blank a sheet of paper as possible. We identified the key issues relating to a manufacturer’s requirements of IT, and did the research to see if we could cherry-pick best practices and importantly, integrate them in a way which in terms of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is as agnostic a way as possible.” One of the USPs of the resulting products is that according to Gregory, they are “plug and play by comparison with what else is out there.”

From the outset, the LYNQ offering was purely cloud based and provided predominantly on a SaaS (software as a service) basis. “Both will become the norm, so it made sense to start as we would need to go on,” says Gregory. He believes the recurring revenue enables a company to achieve stable growth. He is also concerned that cloud technology favours large volume rather than niche software, which can be devalued as a consequence.

“Let’s look at one of the internet-based accounting packages,” he says by way of example. “It racked up seven years of losses until break even was achieved, because selling at under £20 a month requires real volume to be established. But they are setting the bar when it comes to price expectation, and the danger is that the software development ecosystem is then destabilised.

“If prices continue to be under such pressure, then it will result in less remuneration for channel partners and it is clear that already there are fewer partners now who are able to go into factories and talk to potential customers on our behalf.”

That said, his sales pitch couldn’t be simpler or more to the point. It’s all about improving productivity right across a manufacturer’s organisation - and having a customer citing a four-month return on investment, with another declaring machine downtime has been reduced by 27% to provide substantiation.

But no matter how powerful the chapter and

to apply that judgement. I’m part lawyer, part marketer, part salesman, part fundraiser; everything’s my job just because I’m the CEO.”

Thompson says he prefers pure management. Luckily he finds it easy to delegate and ‘let go’, unlike some entrepreneurs. “Some insist on being ‘hub and spoke’,” he suggests. “They have to be at the centre of everything and they work colossal hours, but they find they can never build a company of more than fifty people.”

He’s also keen to grow the business overseas, but that adds the complexity of communication he suggests. “We were closing a deal last night and an American colleague told me he was ‘going bird-dog’ and I had no idea what he was talking about; I had to look it up. It means to go out and get the prey, be really determined to make something happen, to have dogged determination.”

Recurring revenuefor stable growthAfter being dispatched to Boston, Massachusetts, to help set up a production facility for medical and industrial pumps which would mirror an existing UK operation, Mark Gregory found an interesting passage home. It came in the form of a job at LYNQ, the reseller of the software he had been using in the USA. He subsequently joined a manufacturer of medical diagnostic test kits where he was chief information officer and became involved in the process of selling off 50% of the business.

Tiring of the daily commute, he phoned the founder of LYNQ (located nearer to home) and suggested that the two of them get together to provide managed services both to the test kit manufacturer he had been working for and the companies which had been hived off.

That was in 2011. And the conscious decision was made to use the funds generated by providing managed services to invest in developing ideas for the future. “A company

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Why market leadertransformed itselfHow does a clear market leader transform itself - and actually, why would it need to?

The second part of the question makes Rod Williams, chief executive of Autodata Publishing Group smile. “I think a successful business can easily become drawn into its own comfort zone and get stuck in its ways. That invariably leads to a degree of complacency,” he says. “As good as your reputation is, that opens the door to hungrier competitors and their disruptive approach can soon start to erode your position.”

Autodata provide the technical data which enable vehicle workshops to service, maintain, diagnose and repair over 40,000 different models of cars, vans and motorcycles.

The oldest vehicle covered is the very first model of the Mini from 1959. And that legacy also serves an extraordinary barrier to entry. The manuals cover twenty-one languages including variations on English. “The word bonnet wouldn’t resonate in the US,” says Williams. “It has to be hood. And their cars have a trunk not a boot.”

“Simplicity, accuracy and consistency are key when working in highly technical environments such as workshops,” says Williams. “Vehicle manufacturers all produce data in their own formats, and with over 150 manufacturers, mechanics would need to learn each style and the technical language preferred by each individual manufacturer. We do this for them, pulling together data from all manufacturers in one consistent and easy to use format.”

Over some while, Autodata have ridden the wave of delivery mechanisms - from printed material to CD-Roms to on-line. The only problem was that the latest delivery mechanism didn’t replace the incumbent, and in 2012 all three formats were still being made available. “We hadn’t been brave enough to get rid of the books or CDs,” muses Williams. “We also felt it looked like we had simply replicated our

verse, or effective the channel partner for that matter, Gregory says technology companies still need to get out there and engage in some direct sales activity because it is important for them to understand how to sell their own product. Interestingly for a small technology company, LYNQ have been comfortable with software development taking place in the Ukraine, although that has mostly shifted to Poland for political stability reasons.

The bigger decision though has been to shift the company’s focus totally onto its manufacturing software, even though at the time, services represented 66% of the business. Bravery? Gregory shrugs. He doesn’t look at it in that light. “To grow managed services would mean we would have to increase the size of the business significantly but it’s an activity where competition is fiercer,” he explains. “Also we can’t hold down a relationship with a partner if we are then selling against them in terms of the managed services proposition. We all need a particular place in the IT eco system. What is counter-productive is to fight each other instead of realising that we could actually be supporting each other.

“Of course to take this kind of step we needed to have real belief in our product. But our confidence is based on knowing gaps still exist in the IT armoury of small to medium sized manufacturers and we are the only providers who are plugging them effectively.”

Most of their customers are actually in the US. “It might seem counter intuitive, but we built our US business first because of a relationship with a channel partner,” explains Gregory, “so now we need to do the reverse of an export campaign to increase our presence in the UK.” He says it would be foolish not to look closely at Germany and China as well, because the multi-language capabilities of the products mean that selling to non-English speaking countries won’t require significant redevelopment of the platforms.”

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Sense of purposeis really essentialA real sense of purpose is an essential characteristic if a technology company is gong to be distinctive. That’s according to Dr Nasser Siabi, chief executive of Microlink PC, a pioneer of what is called assistive technology, which has enabled the business to help more than 250,000 employees and higher education students with disabilities or health conditions succeed in education or employment.

While studying for his PhD in electronics and computer science at Southampton University, he had been selling computers both to fellow students and the faculty. After graduating he joined his brother’s company, but was advised by his father to set up a business of his own. Not long after he received an enquiry from Southampton University for a disabled student who needed a computer. The letter came with a list of fifteen products being sourced for the student, with Dr Siabi’s company listed against just the one.

Most companies would have simply responded to the enquiry. Dr Siabi contacted the university to say Microlink PC could supply all the requirements rather than the student having to put them all together. “We offered to do it on a turnkey basis, not only installing everything but providing the warranties and service backup for all the time the student was on the course,” he explains. “Take the job first and then learn how to do it; that’s the entrepreneurial approach.”

Over the following eighteen years, Microlink PC were the unchallenged leader in such provision, supplying, installing, and managing the IT needs of 80% of disabled students in higher education in this country.

“What we do makes a difference to people’s lives and it resonates with my struggles in childhood,” says Dr Siabi. “If every student has the same opportunity, they can do well in life, but they need access to the tools and support to do the job.” He recognised that Microlink PC could also provide the same service for

printed book pages online, so we invested in re-developing our whole approach to the product so that the user was at the centre. Our vision is to supply any piece of data to anyone at any point in time without the customer having to filter out extraneous material.”

If the company hadn’t been brave enough before, it was certainly making up for lost time with the decision just to be on line. Because at the juncture, off-line represented 60% of sales, and relocating everything online, which was completed in 2015, wasn’t easy when there’s a legacy to move.

Adoption of course also requires an element of culture shift on the part of the customer. Most workshops rely on a PC stuck on a desk, instead of the mechanic having a proverbial screwdriver in one hand, and the tablet in the other.

“In one respect we had another kind of legacy to deal with because we had to change from being a data supply business to a technology company in terms of how we processed the information, managed it, and then delivered it,” says Williams. “And a company never reaches the point where it can tick a box to say that a job is finished. It’s a constant evolution. If a technology company delivers quality of data and information, then it’s in a good place. Rivals might change their packaging to appear smarter, but below the surface, they aren’t as accurate or as comprehensive.”

Even with market leadership, Williams still sees plenty of potential for Autodata. Eastern Europe countries, he says, are only now beginning to professionalise the car workshops, creating the need for better systems. In fact there’s potential anywhere in the world that has a growing middle class, which usually leads to an increase in vehicle sales. And he’s relaxed about consolidation in retail automotive. “The result tends not to be garage closures, unlike its impact in other market sectors,” explains Williams.

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made it a price-driven transaction. The consequence is that students now make up 20% of turnover; companies provide 80%.

Wouldn’t schools be an obvious,and viable market, particularly with the passing of the Special Education Needs & Disabilites Act? “They have to provide for the needs of disabled pupils, but they haven’t been given any extra funding to do so,” says Dr Siabi ruefully. “We do say to schools that the tools we provide can be used by everyone in the classroom, but I think educators can be scared of technology because the children know more about it than they do, or they haven’t got time to get to grips with it. The biggest barrier to entry can be the teacher, because they have to want to be trained to use the tools we provide. There has to be a head who is forward thinking and is prepared to do things differently. Another benefit of course is that what is described as assistive technology will free up their time.

companies. “We triage a disabled employee’s requirement, recommend the solution, install the IT, and provide all the necessary support,” he explains. It can be quite a process with a corporate, requiring liaison with their HR, IT, even their FM departments.

But having a proven business process in place, Microlink PC can put everything together in just fourteen days, compared to the three months it originally took, and at a cost per person which is a fifth of what it used to be. Today the company is now the largest assistive technology and workplace adjustment provider.

Why hasn’t there been more competition? Dr Siabi has a theory: “If, in addition to doing a good job, you are sensitive to the customer, then you begin to build a reputation, and that serves to create an emotional barrier to entry.”

All was fine until the student loan company changed the rules and required three companies to quote for the assistive technology. Which

Dr Nasser Siabi, Microlink PC

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a business more efficiently. That’s the goal at enterprise resource planning software company Epicor, according to Andy Archer, regional vice president of Epicor UK and Ireland.

He believes enterprise resource planning has to be the backbone of business. “Companies can’t really operate without some form of it,” he suggests.

“There’s nothing businesses do which doesn’t involve some kind of enterprise application. A lot of what ERP is about is planning real life, helping users to manage people and assets and inventories. That can’t be done well manually.”

That said, adds Martin Hill, vice president marketing, some businesses will only invest in ERP software when they absolutely have to. “There’s a human tendency to resist change until it’s painful not to. Technology companies need to find a way to make companies realise how much pain they’re actually in, then make them excited about the way forward.”

ERP is interesting in terms of its evolution, says Archer. “It really kicked off in the eighties, when it was very good for getting sales orders on the system. Where it fell down was in being able to present information to users on how their business was doing and it wasn’t brilliant at unstructured processes, like how to deal with quality issues. That’s where the next challenge is, going from structured to unstructured processes, that will differentiate us in the market.

“We see ERP as getting more responsive, enabling companies to go from concept to design and manufacture very quickly. It’s all about providing the right information. SMEs tend to fail because they don’t make a decision or they make the wrong decision. What our ERP is geared around is getting the right information to the right people in the right context.”

And that’s becoming more significant as business speeds up, important as the key advantages of ERP are generally around reducing waste and improving accuracy, says Hill. “It wasn’t long ago that if you wanted a new pair of shoes you had to wait until you had some time to go to the shops. Now you can order them on your phone and they can be

“The type of technology we deploy is absolutely essential in the school environment. If we don’t address the problem at this earlier stage, then the disabled are further stigmatised and put at a disadvantage from day one.”

The devices deployed by Microlink PC to encourage learning include a mobile phone which takes a picture of a page of a textbook and then ‘reads’ it out loud. Dr Siabi says this would be of real benefit to children with autism who can fall behind with their reading because they are more easily distracted. “Disability is a word which is widely applied,” he muses. “It can refer to physical issues, impairments to the senses, and mental health for example, but I would say society makes people disabled because of the barriers put in their way or a failure to support them. Our ambition is to provide disabled people with a level digital playing field throughout their lives.”

Figures suggest that 20% of the UK workforce is disabled if the government’s definition is applied, but Dr Siabi points out that this doesn’t include those who have a condition such as a bad back, or are dyslexic. Sometimes, he says, they put up with discomfort for fear of losing their job. “The size of the task is huge but so is the potential gain both commercially and for society as a whole.” He points to the return on investment figures for assistive technology. One corporate client reported a reduction in long term absenteeism by 92%; for every pound spent, the employer saved at least £2.50 just in direct costs associated with absenteeism.

The government’s access to work scheme can provide funding. Dr Siabi says he is disappointed that SMEs are not really aware of it.

Helping customersimprove serviceWhat a technology company has to do is enable its customers to deliver a better service to theirs. And that’s achieved by keeping ahead of trends so that they can present new ways to run

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Ease of use is a major trend

Here’s an interesting take on what makes a software product a success. Being liked by the end-user, suggests David Grundy, chief executive of Invenias. “You can’t force users to adapt to new systems,” he says, “by waving some kind of stick and telling them ‘you need to use this’. People have to choose to use the tools; it has to be about willing participation.

“If the product is liked by the end users, that means take-up of it within an organisation will be enthusiastic, which is our key selling point.”

The need for ease of use is a major trend in business software, he says. “Expectations of users have changed. They have less time available for training so they need software that’s intuitive. But though it’s easy to say software needs to be easy to use, it’s harder to deliver.”

“The issue for clients,” explains Grundy, “is that if they don’t get adoption, they aren’t harvesting the data, which is where the real value is for them. It’s a virtuous circle; if you give someone a tool they enjoy using, that helps them to be successful in their team and as an individual; and the company can harness their knowledge. And because everyone can leverage the data, they work better as a team.

“If a company has thirty people who can all tap into each others’ insight that’s incredibly valuable and makes the difference in terms of how quickly they can solve any problems.” As importantly, he adds, it means those problems don’t have to be re-solved time and time again.

Just then the meeting room at Invenias has become free. Ushering some visitors into it, Grundy says having to compete for space at HQ is one of the challenges of running a fast-growing business. Turnover has exceeded £6million from £1million three years ago.

With offices and hosting centres across EMEA, the US and Asia, Invenias support thousands of users across sixty countries who use their platform to support their executive

delivered that same day. People expect the same immediacy with everything. Technology’s a fantastic enabler for that. It connects business to partners, supply chain and customers.”

Fundamentally though it’s not the technology which excites customers; it’s the potential it brings to offer better service to their customers. “ERP is offering a way for companies to build competitive advantage by better managing customer relationships,” says Archer.

But there’s a reason why Epicor believe that companies need to make the investment in ERP which is much closer to home. “Employees have very different expectations of the technologies that should be available to them,” says Archer. “Businesses will have to embrace those technologies to attract the right staff.”

Epicor have more than 20,000 customers in over 150 countries, with 1100 in the UK. Turnover is $900million worldwide. With one specialisation in the food industry, Archer sees opportunities for growth coming from the popularity of niche areas like artisan food, halal, and micro-breweries. “We talked recently to a business in London that sells same-day personalised cakes. They reflect a trend to move from mass manufacture to personalised. You can see it in fashion with eight seasons instead of four and we’ll see soon that in other sectors,” says Archer. “Profit in manufacture will go down but service will be where the value add is, and it’s incumbent on companies like us to provide the technologies to enable that kind of connection to be made with the consumer.”

“So much of what people spend time doing can be automated,” suggests Hill. “Humans will do what they’re best at: unstructured stuff, assessing and making decisions rather than doing rote work they can teach a machine to do. Automated warehouses have been around for years. ERP can connect things up so you can get an immediate knowledge of how things are going without ever having to step outside your office. You can be anywhere in the world, watching what’s going on in your factory.”

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The business is very international, with offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Reading, Prague, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney. The US is a big growth area, with 50% of new sales expected to come from there over the next twelve months. Major customers in North America include in-house executive search teams at General Atlantic, Samsung, Tesla Motors and the Royal Bank of Canada, plus leading executive search firms such as ON Partners, and The Toft Group.

The international challenges are around timely delivery, making sure data centres are in place to support the cloud-based operations, and that people to provide the support and service are available in all areas. “It’s about making sure we’re ready to deliver,” summarises Grundy, “building the trust and reputation in each local market”.

He expands on what he means by trust. “I’m talking about the customer having the trust in our ability to take care of their data and provide them with a platform that’s always available,” he explains, “and trust in our ability to continue to do that day in and day out, well after we have won the contract.”

In a sense, he says, the subscription-based model keeps the company focused on that. “It’s like continually having to win the customer as they pay us every month for continued services and ongoing access. This is a heart and soul sales process. It’s not a one-off transaction. It’s a trust-based engagement that requires capable sales people to really get close to customers.”

That makes key sales appointments as important as any executive post. Interestingly, one of the ways the company makes them is by engaging executive search firms, who in turn will be using Invenias software.

“Providing we stay focused on product innovation and maintain our approach to the customer, we can continue to grow what is already a sustainable business,” says Grundy.

search businesses. Invenias were listed as a company to watch in the British Venture Capital Association’s handbook, ‘Britain’s Hot Talent’ 2014/15.

“It was only three years ago that I was based in a small room with four other people,” muses Grundy. “But we’re relaxed to be in growth mode, taking well planned, achievable steps. The scary thing for me would be not moving forward. If we weren’t growing, someone else would be. A number of us have worked in organisations where we were responsible for materially larger businesses so we know what that looks and feels like.

“I’ve been asked what it’s like running a business which you co-own rather than being a manager at Oracle, for example, and I say the focus is no different. We do what we need to do for our customers.’”

Founded in 2005 to take advantage of “an under-served area of opportunity,” the company soon started to get serious and took on venture capital to help it grow,

In 2013, Invenias received a strategic investment from MMC Ventures to support further product innovation and continued expansion of the global sales and service operations. “The healthiest relationships with investors are when you choose to be with them, not because you need to,” suggests Grundy.

He says the external governance and checks and balances have been good for the business. “Our independent chairman is Mark Farmer, co-founder of Eden Ventures, who also invests privately. He plays an active part in board meetings and he coaches and challenges me constructively. His experience and skill-set is tremendously valuable to us.”

Much of the company’s marketing is done through online demos, with Grundy saying that once they see the system, potential customers are generally keen to have a trial, which usually leads to a sale.

Once that happens, the customers become the company’s best ambassadors, he declares. “Thirty per cent of leads come from existing customer recommendations, and we have a low churn rate of under five per cent.”

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the customer can choose as an option. And that provides InSync with the opportunity to develop a brand of their own - and develop relationships with end users. “The one problem with selling through OEMs,” explains Flannaghan, “is that we aren’t talking directly to the customer; we rely on feedback from the OEM, and a technology company needs to be closer to the end user to really be able to look at meeting their future needs from their perspective.”

The ‘live’ element of broadcasting and the existence of so many television sets used conventionally, with the viewer following the broadcasters’ schedules, means that InSync have the luxury of lead time to innovate. “But that doesn’t mean we can take our foot off the accelerator, says Flannaghan, “because there is a growing sophistication in terms of the tools required by broadcasters.”

Market predictions are that revenues from InSync’s hardware will actually increase, mainly because of the increase in the number of channels and the value attributed to live events such as football. But there is an argument that broadcasting as we know it will ultimately be doomed as people use programme depositaries (BBC iPlayer, Amazon, Netflix etc) and choose to watch when and where they want to, and on what. In response, InSync’s software will be used to prepare content for such providers.

While the broadcast industry is global, the UK can be credited with creating the technology market which serves it, says Flannaghan. “Talented people from organisations such as the BBC, IBA, and ITCA went off to set up companies such as Quantel, and Snell (which have now come together as one). Those ‘training grounds’ either no longer exist or are focused on specific technologies, so the centre of gravity for broadcast R&D has moved to Canada which offers generous tax breaks and an enlightened immigration policy.”

Looking to the future, he says InSync will be more or less where it is now in terms of ethos and structure, but they will have branched out into sectors such as surveillance, quality control, ever more sophisticated image manipulation and processing, plus metadata generation

Focus has been onthe engineeringThere are more television broadcasting systems in use in the world than you can wave a remote at. That international programming can be made compatible, and that all the various feeds can be managed is down to products designed and manufactured by InSync Technology. Yet even in the industry, they’re not really recognised for it.

Which is because their products carry the brand name and the logos of the OEMs they sell through. “Our focus has been totally on the engineering,” says Barry Flannaghan, their managing director.

It could also be said that InSync Technology are slightly unusual in that the company is majority owned by its employees (75% of the shares are held in an employee benefit trust). “Perhaps that makes us less prepared to take risks,” muses Flannaghan, “but I would prefer to make the point that it provides stability. There is a debate to be had on how employee ownership of a company affects their performance, but with our model, all employees are able to realise some significant financial value from their shares. The owners created the trust because they wanted to see the continuity of the business and didn’t want any one person to be able to bring undue influence on it.”

Another unusual thing about InSync Technology is that the cloud isn’t really one of their priorities. “Live broadcast from major sporting events will continue to need our hardware,” says Flannaghan. “It can’t be done in the cloud, because there can’t be any latency. With dedicated hardware it takes much less than a second; it can take minutes otherwise.”

But once sound and pictures are in the studio, the emphasis - and the future - shifts to software. And this is where InSync will really have an opportunity to have the top shot. While OEMs will continue to sell to workflow providers (hardware), the specific manipulation of image data is provided as a plug-in which

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More of an issue is finding the calibre of people who can perpetuate the company’s engineering ethos. “Candidates have to be good at maths and programming,” says Flannaghan, “because it is not just about implementing complex algorithms, but understanding them, which is necessary if we are to push technology to its limits.”

(data which provides information about the content). And for a company which has such an engineering focus, maybe InSync’s stance on intellectual property protection shouldn’t come as a surprise. “If the aim of a technology company is to exit, then there is a requirement to build up a patent portfolio because that ticks a box for potential investors and purchasers,” suggests Flannaghan. “We have chosen not to use extensive IP protection processes because we prefer not to tell competitors what we are doing. What we do is to try and ensure our IP cannot be reverse engineered and copied.”

Barry Flannaghan, InSync

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correct. Somewhere they will have price or product information that’s wrong.”

What exacerbates that problem is when a retailer is trying to meet its promise to match competitors’ prices. “If they’re putting on and taking off promotional offers all the time, that’s more than staff can handle manually,” suggests Dark. “Typically less than 40% of price optimisation companies’ recommendations can be implemented at one time.”

The ability to change prices rapidly is particularly helpful with fresh produce. Instead of waiting until just before the ‘best before’ date, then manually reducing prices, says Dark, retailers can reduce prices gradually in line with the supply and demand curve as the ‘best before’ gets nearer. That has a potentially massive impact on loss and on waste, he argues.

And the system can be invaluable to the European retailers who offer to give a product for free if they are not the cheapest. “That’s created a generation of people who are on the hunt for bargains,” says Dark, “and it means the retailers have to be bang up to date with price changes. How can that be managed that without electronic labelling?”

The system also helps address what Dark believes is the new generation of consumers’ fundamental mistrust of conventional paper-based information. “In particular, not everyone is enamoured with the price-match paper vouchers that some supermarkets hand out at the till with the promise of money off their next shop,” says Dark. “Having to hold onto a slip of paper to get £1 off your next shop is just a pain, especially as you have to use the voucher in seven days or a similar period. There’s a big chance customers won’t spend the vouchers, so what have they achieved?”

Digital labels can also provide information about where the product comes from, available sizes, even customer internet reviews, all allowing the consumer to make an informed choice.

A breakthrough for Displaydata was working out how colour could be introduced. “That was quite a technological advance,” says Dark. “Our tier one prospects said a very readable black

System appeals tonew generationWalk back down the supermarket aisle. Suddenly you notice that the chocolate digestives are now on special offer. But there’s no sign of any shelf-stacker or other member of staff for that matter. So who altered the facing?

How was it changed would be the better question. According to Andrew Dark, chief executive of Displaydata, if retailers want to stake a claim to be champions of the consumer there’s only way to do it. And that’s by using electronic price tags which are operated remotely, allowing product information and pricing to be changed at (commercial) will.

His company sells electronic shelf labels (ESLs) and dynamic digital display solutions systems. Now without having seen one before, you might imagine a dynamic shelf label would look like an old-style LCD display. Wrong. Dark produces a display case full of tags of various sizes and shapes and it’s surprising to see that they look as though they’re made of paper - imagine a Kindle book reader but miniaturised.

It’s only when Dark twiddles with the dynamic communicator – the little box of tricks that runs the system – that you see the prices and information on the labels change and realise they are not made of paper at all but are something far cleverer.

Of course in an in-store environment the labels are controlled wirelessly, either from the retailer’s head office or by Displaydata as a managed service from the cloud. Each communicator device can control up to 64,000 individual price tags – more if the configuration is changed.

One of the big advantages of the technology is that it reduces the financial and environmental cost of printing labels and increases the level of accuracy. “There’s no tier one retailer who can claim to be 100% accurate in shelf pricing when using paper labels,” says Dark. “There’s no way that 5000 stores can be simultaneously

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resellers who integrate Displaydata with their own systems.

A third, newer, target market is providing managed services through cloud-based networks to smaller retailers. “We’re launching this on a rental model,” says Dark, “covering the displays, software, data analytics, all for a fixed fee. For small retailers who want to keep pace with the major players, it’s quite affordable.”

Saving labour costs are not really a driver for the investment, Dark believes. “It’s more about labour efficiency, reducing menial tasks and freeing staff to do more productive tasks like selling and serving customers.”

Interestingly the UK lags behind other countries in using ESLs, which have been popular in a number of countries since the mid-late 1990s. France in particular had heavy take-up, largely because of having had to display prices in both euros and francs. Japan also had significant deployment a decade ago, but, says Dark, the solutions were low quality and unsophisticated compared with what’s available now.

In the UK and US, it’s taken longer for big retailers to get on board. Supermarkets in this country have tried out ESL systems in the past but Dark says they didn’t invest enough to make them work well. “The signage they tried could only change the price and didn’t provide other product or promotional information, which kind of defeated the object.”

But Displaydata will be working on a number of pilot schemes in the UK with a number of large retailers in both food and non-food. And in the US, Displaydata is in around 600 Sears stores and counts a significant consumer electronics chain, plus New York headquartered B&H Foto among their clients.

The technology, Dark says, is fully mature and tested, with millions of labels in the field. “Retailers have traditionally waited for their peers to demonstrate a proven return on investment before committing to new thing; we have to be able to make an incredibly compelling case. That ROI is happening all over the place. We have retailers in the US

and white label was just what they needed; then we brought in colour and they said now we have exactly what we wanted as well.”

The system can even be programmed to recognise customers as they enter the store and push promotions specifically to them, rather like a very proactive digital loyalty card system. As the consumer moves around the store the retailer can alert them to special offers in that aisle. Later, the retailer can analyse the data to find out if the consumer actually bought the product. Pretty much all retailers are now testing out this kind of technology, says Dark, but Displaydata’s version has two-way communications and can be managed remotely. There’s even a label that can work inside a freezer. In theory it could act as a secondary temperature monitor as well as being a price tag.

The labels are battery powered and use power only while their information is being changed. So if a network goes down or there’s a power cut they simply retain the latest information programmed into them. But isn’t there’s the potential for hacking? What if a disgruntled employee decided to change the prices? “That actually happened to a competitor’s system,” says Dark. “Someone in a well-known European supermarket chain put rude words on the labels and reduced all the prices to one euro cent.”

But that couldn’t happen with Displaydata equipment. “We have a very secure, complex, encrypted system that’s incredibly difficult to break into. You would need a lot of expensive equipment to take control of a display and even then you’d only have control for seventeen seconds and then you’d have to start again. There are easier ways to get even!” With all this technology available, old-style LCD price displays, not to mention paper labels, are becoming harder for retailers to justify from a cost perspective, says Dark.

The target market is two-fold. First off, the world’s top 250 retailers. They are the route to scale up the business, says Dark, and as the market leaders and influencers, they will drive adoption in the lower tiers. Then there are the

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by comparison is very niche,”Prentis explains. “There are 6000 contact centres, 800 of which are relevant to us, and we only need sixty of those in the next three years to get 5% of the UK market in terms of maintained contact centres, and 10% in terms of tertiary products.”

The business plan aims for turnover to go from £10million to £30million in three years as a consequence. “We’re on track,” says Prentis, “because this isn’t a punt. The contact centre environment is ideally suited to our consultative approach. The voice element remains significant in contact centres and possibly its importance has increased as it’s where customers are at their most emotional. They contact you because they need something, or there’s a problem and that means it’s an area where interaction with customers is critical.”

It was in 2001 that Prentis founded the company to enable clients to transform their customer service provision. In the early days the business was rather like a cottage industry, he says. “What we were doing was bespoke, before realising that we should try to ‘productise’, making what we do more repeatable and scalable. Ironically, though, it’s easier to write a totally bespoke product than one that immediately meets 80% of everyone’s needs.”

Product development has been driven by, among other things, credit card protection regulations, which mean call centres aren’t allowed to store credit card numbers. Six years ago IP Integration developed a way to stop the recording of calls when the customer gave their card number. That’s now used by clients such as LV and Ladbrokes.

A more recent variant of that is PCI On Demand, a payment card industry (PCI) product that diverts the call at the point of payment to another site, meaning the data is never held in any form on the client’s own premises. Something similar is offered by a competitor but it’s expensive. “It ticked all the boxes but we can tick those boxes more cost effectively,” says Prentis.

He says the technology is “ground-breaking” - and it wasn’t factored into the original

improving margins and sales because staff are talking to customers instead of walking around changing prices. And we have an electronics retailer saying margins have improved by 156 percentage points.”

“In the next twelve months we expect to double or triple turnover and to achieve the same, if not more, in the year after. I can see a scenario where we could grow by ten times in twelve months.” Turnover for the year to March 2017 will be over $40million.

The supply chain won’t be a problem – their factories in Asia are geared up to be able to move five million units a month and can double or treble in scale thereafter. Neither is working capital an issue: Dark says shareholders in the venture-backed private company, including big players like Zebra Technology, Landsdowne and secondary private equity investor Coller Capital, are “hugely” supportive.

Specialism leads tomore understanding“Some companies make a very good living simply offering connectivity. But according to Joe Prentis, chief executive of IP Integration, they’re like a utility, the equivalent of a British Gas or nPower, basically offering the same thing, which means to the customer, they’re simply a supplier.

That is precisely why offering consultancy and bespoke products is essential, he says, in order to establish differentiation from “mundane, me-too” resellers. “By investing in understanding the customer’s business, a technology business will be in a better position to assist them.”

With that in mind, IP Integration have developed a specialism in contact centres. “A few years ago we asked ourselves ‘what did we want to be famous for’? Did we want to be just in systems integration or connectivity – we wouldn’t get the status in that space because there are some very big players. But we felt we could be famous in contact centres – which

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triumphantly. “The customer got a return on their investment in one afternoon – the day of the Grand National. Maybe we under priced,” he adds ruefully, with hindsight. “But we won a lot of other work on the back of that. Once you prove you can do one thing, customers are prepared to sound you out about something else.”

Prentis started his first technology business while he was still at college and later ran a VC-backed business, owning a small slice. That was sold to C&W in 2000 and he bought one component of the business back to start IP. Prentis says his core A team has stayed with him through all three companies, which gives valuable stability. He says he’s a hands on manager. “Interfering and opinionated, some might say,” he jokes. “But I know I don’t have all the answers.”

The business has made a couple of small acquisitions, both local niche IT companies that Prentis knew and that he felt he could bring into the “mother ship” with little risk. And the additions have helped the process of scaling up. “We have sufficient people for the size of business we are, a big enough A team, but we will have to grow.” The current ninety or so people, he thinks, will reach 150 by the time turnover reaches £30million.

“We’re in it for the long haul,” he says. “We might say once we’re at £30million, let’s get to £50million now; there’s no stick in the ground saying at £30million we sell. That turnover figure is just a milestone. Achieving it will give us options.”

Achieving rapidacceptanceMike Unger gets out his mobile phone and sends a text. Seconds later the phone beeps to inform him that he has an appointment at the sexual health clinic at Bart’s Hospital, London.

Unger doesn’t actually want the appointment, or need it, he hastens to point out; he’s just

business plan. So it should add a new dynamic to accelerate growth. The scale of the potential could pose a delightful problem to have. “At what point do we have to consider developing it as a separate business? That’s a complete new challenge we could face,” he adds.

It’s all part of the intention to create adjunct products, and has certainly caught the attention of Avaya, which have presented IP Integration with their UK partner of the year award. “If a technology company can add value to a partner’s platform, offering other attributes their customers might want, then they in turn will be seen as a better partner,” says Prentis. “Most of our competitors are technology vendors and can tell you anything you want to know about bites and widgets but not how to get the best out of the product. But we can advise on operational matters like reducing agent churn and call handling times.”

Historically, growth had been through offering new product to existing customers, rather than acquiring new customers. A customer-driven product development approach, in essence. “The result is that we became a best kept secret,” admits Prentis. “Getting new business is very different from selling to existing customers.”

Most on the roster are mainly UK based (including the Co-operative Group, The Caravan Club and DialAFlight) but IP Integration are opening an office in the Far East, and with sufficient intellectual property protection will do the same in the US and Europe, says Prentis.

Some business is won through the equivalent of word-of-mouth. The company has been securing a multi-million-pound deal with a Far East gaming company, which was impressed by their work for Ladbrokes. And that business had been won because IP Integration impressed at a consultancy stage. “A public company competitor was telling them they needed to pay £1million to replace their old systems. We said we could come up with a different solution at a fraction of the price. So then the competitor halved their price. We said we would match it. Then they said they would do it for free! And still we won the business,” he says

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trend for mobile telecoms steered them in that direction, looking for ways that mobile phones could solve business problems.

A coincidental meeting with Addenbrookes Hospital led to them developing one of the first NHS texting platforms, and healthcare became their focus.

In 2006 Mikkom were approached by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital to develop an online booking and triage system for sexual health. It doesn’t diagnose, Unger stresses, but prioritises patients according to their answers to online questions. For example, if certain symptoms are suggested by patient input, the system will tell the user to go straight to A&E and will not offer the option to book a clinic appointment online.

The system achieved rapid patient acceptance, which Unger attributes to the fact that so many patients are young people, who are used to finding information and booking things online.

demonstrating the system developed by his company, Mikkom. So he replies ‘cancel’ and within seconds gets another text to say his appointment is no more. The system, he explains, will now automatically offer his cancelled slot to another person in the queue.

It can be that simple to arrange NHS appointments, thanks to the software development work carried out by Mikkom over the past decade or so.

Unger has a degree in computer science and worked for many years in sales and marketing. In 1999 he finished a stint running a company’s Nordic operations and had no clear idea what to do next. “I had a mid-life crisis but no desire for a Ferrari or a motorbike,” he jokes. “I just knew I didn’t want to work for anyone else.”

The solution was to set up his own business. With a partner, Olli Ruskomaa, he founded Mikkom, which was to be focused around call centres and telecoms. Subsequently the growing

Mike Unger, Mikkom

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systems in Canada and one in the US, as well as signing their first contract in the UK with a private healthcare provider. That particular deal is significant since the client works for more than fifteen NHS trusts.

Security was the biggest question (far more important than Mikkom’s relatively small size) when it came to winning that contract, says Unger. Patient confidentiality and data protection is generally a major issue, as one would expect. Unger comments: “Our technical director came from the banking industry so it’s as bullet proof as we can make it.”

Growth so far has been organic, says Unger, which has meant “chugging along”, which he says he’s been happy to do, but only up to a point. “It now feels painfully slow, like pushing a boulder up a hill,” he says. Unger says the business is now getting traction and he has a grand goal in mind: “I want our system to be adopted by every NHS trust in the country.”

Being on course to achieving that goal would require a relatively modest £500,000 in extra investment. Unger and Ruskomaa, who own 30% each, are happy to give up around 10% in return. “That’s reasonable,” they say, “otherwise we’ll have to accept that the business will grow much more slowly. Cash flow is the main issue for a technology company: that’s why a decent chunk of money would be so liberating.”

In the meantime, Unger sees Mikkom as a “small, very focused” product company selling licences to the big players, especially overseas. “They could have a new customer up and running in less than a day,” says Unger. “It’s very slick.”

Need to understandproduct affinitiesHas the time come for big data to really take off? The idea has been talked about for a while but now organisations are getting their heads around it and investing in it, according to Celebrus Technologies.

“The hospitals still get some walk-ins but over time they have fallen off considerably,” says Unger. The system has won an NHS award for innovation.

In 2009 the system was taken up by Barts which has a lot of ‘working’ people in the area, so has an unusually heavy demand for sexual health clinics.

Take-up has been impressive. Unger recalls seeing a girl standing outside the hospital using the text system to book an appointment. “She could have just walked in!” he says. “Actually, the loveliest accolade came from the receptionists at Bart’s (hospital) who said they loved it because the phone had stopped ringing.”

The focus since then has been on combining online booking with text booking in the form of the Mikkom Choose & Book (mCB) system. It means the clinics know in advance what the demand will be and can adjust availability if staff are away sick, or adjust staffing numbers if a sudden influx of patients is expected.

“The system is really easy to use and much fairer for patients, as slots are allocated on a first come, first served basis,” says Unger. “Patients don’t have to spend ages on the phone trying to get through, only to find out that all the slots have gone.”

The significance of the system for the NHS is that it reduces the number of missed appointments because it’s so easy to arrange and change appointment times. “The cost of DNA (did not attend) to the health service is staggering,” says Unger. “Each missed appointment costs £150. If we can reduce that by only one or two per cent it makes a big difference. I’m a Yorkshireman and I don’t like wasting money. It’s about how much we can make existing processes more efficient.”

An issue, intrinsic to working with the NHS, is budget (of course). “From 2010 the NHS had one foot on the accelerator and one on the brake in terms of decisions. On one hand they had to improve performance but on the other hand they couldn’t spend money,” says Unger. That led to Mikkom having more of a focus on overseas health services and they now have five

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value purchase. Within twenty-four hours of launching the campaign they are able to know whether it was really working.” Isn’t it all a bit Big Brother? Well, continues Hulls, for one thing the data adheres to privacy requirements.

Celebrus software is deployed on more than 25,000 websites, with clients in a variety of sectors. “They were traditionally IT managers but that’s changing,” says Hulls. “Now it’s the people responsible for the customer experience, those in analytics and in marketing. We can end up with a lot of people around the table. The result of implementation can be a complete re-think of tried and tested ways of doing things. A mail-order retailer, for example, which really “got” big data, no longer needs to send out their generic printed catalogues.”

Challenges for businesses involved in data science include the lack of people who want to train in that area, says Hulls. “It has been a bit geeky, and I imagine there can be a preference to be a game designer or to be working in social media. Good data scientists have got a statistical, innovative, creative mindset and that’s a hard combination to find.”

That issue has slowed down market adoption of data analytics as the premise is to turn data into value. So one of the roles of Celebrus is to help clients get started on a “crawl, walk, run” basis. “There’s no harm in starting with the crawl,” says Hulls. “Even if a company hasn’t much experience, they can use our techniques to build confidence and move to the next stage. It doesn’t have to be a complete transformation all at once. You don’t need a raft of data scientists either - one of our Dutch clients used a student to do predictive work as a summer project.”

The “granularity and incredible detail” of the data it supplies gives Celebrus a real point of difference, says Hulls. “Our protected IP is so advanced that using it for traditional ‘AB’ socio-economic testing would be like using then proverbial sledgehammer to crack a nut.”

In early 2015 Celebrus were acquired by full-service IT company IS Solutions plc, and the company has continued to pursue geographical expansion. “In addition to Europe we have

According to Katharine Hulls, VP marketing of Celebrus Technologies, it’s all about them using data to understand their customers, improve engagement with them, drive personalisation, enhance the customer experience and ultimately increase revenue and loyalty. By analysing social media, for example, an organisation can gain detailed information about how individuals behave online.

They can use big data analytics to understand what Hulls calls ‘product affinities’. For example, research for a catalogue retailer showed that unless it had one particular product in stock, people would abandon their baskets. “A particular dress was driving sales of other products that formed part of an ensemble and the retailer analysed big data analysis to identify what it was,” says Hulls. “Without that dress in stock they wouldn’t just lose the sale of that item but also of the other products.”

The insight that companies gain from such real-time data means they can drive personalisation, one-to-one communications, customer analytics, marketing attribution, cross-channel marketing, campaign optimisation and fraud detection.

Personalisation, she explains, can mean anything from having the individual customer’s name at the top of an email to really sophisticated website interactions, explains Hulls. “It helps organisations deliver the right content at the right time to the right people through the right channels, which gives the customer a good experience.”

And making shopping a good experience is vital, she says. “It’s the age of the consumer. They’re in control and it’s about better service, engaging them and optimising business around doing that.” Big data means an organisation can build a complete picture of each individual’s behaviours across online channels, including details such as clicks, navigation, keystrokes, mouse-moves, play, pause and basket adds.

“By analysing the data companies can see which channel is most effective – those advertising campaigns that are driving visitors to their website, and what behaviour is indicative of purchase and particularly of high-

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“One company had to give everyone a 2% pay rise as using generic software meant they had no mechanism or data capture mechanism to do anything else,” he says.

Of course problems relating to a lack of accurate data about employees don’t have to be eyebrow-raising; they can be as everyday as having to employ people solely to reconcile payroll with other systems.

“Companies will invest huge amounts in CRM systems and that’s great, but it means many of them understand their customers better than their workforce,” says Hale. Fairsail are providing more than an HR database; the software automates everything from talent acquisition to training, appraisals and analytics, and integrates with finance, payroll, and recruitment sources like Linkedin and Monster. And it’s ‘glocal’, enabling global and local policies to be implemented across languages, countries and currencies.

Competitors like US-based Workday and German SAP SuccessFactors tend to focus on larger clients, while Fairsail targets the mid market with 200 to 5000 staff. “These are companies,” says Hale, “that want one simple system that works and is easy to implement and manage. They are urgent, dynamic businesses where time is measured in weeks, not months.”

“Simplicity definitely has to be point of difference for a technology company if its product offering is going to be a commercial success.”

Hale has been programming since he was a teenager and has a computer science degree. He joined Fairsail in 2013, initially as a non-executive director working with founder Colin Cooper. Prior that, he had long spells working first on systems development at Accenture, then as head of the European technology practice at an executive search agency.

What appealed to him about Fairsail was that he’d never worked for a software firm. In October 2013 he became executive chairman, a move he likes to call “the end of the beginning.” Among the 150 or so customers in 130 countries are Skyscanner, the RICS and Paddy Power Betfair plc, who, says Hale, declared it

partners in the growth areas of Australia and New Zealand,” says Hulls. “The next focus is the USA, where we’ve gained a big high-profile client, and Asia Pacific, where one of our partners is actively growing that market.”

Avoiding invisibleemployee syndromeWould you believe that some companies don’t know precisely how many people they employ? Strange but true, says Adam Hale, chief executive of Fairsail, suppliers of HR software, who calls this invisible employee syndrome. “We worked with one which said they had 500 staff; it turned out they had 430.”

The reason? “In many companies,” he says, “it takes several days to collate and gather accurate data on company employees, by which time it’s out of date so effectively useless.”

This is the result, he says, of companies using relatively unsophisticated systems to keep track of their people data, which means they’re not really on top of managing their hiring, retention, training and all the other stuff that goes with running an HR operation.

“That lack of understanding can stifle a growing company,” says Hale. “It’s gone from being next year’s problem to being this year’s.Organisations are having to work harder to engage with their people. We have one client with an annual attrition rate of 40% and another is closer to 50%. We even have HR directors saying people are voluntarily extending their probation periods as they don’t want to commit.”

All this makes it important for employers to have efficient systems for running their HR processes, Hale maintains. And too many don’t. He estimates that something like 70% of mid-size tech companies – who one might expect to be more advanced - use standard office administration software. Does it really matter? Hale responds with a for instance.

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Hale. “Where do you draw the line: you don’t deserve it but you do? I don’t see why everyone shouldn’t have shares.”

Exceptional way tobuild a businessAs the founder of a technology business, Alistair Hartrup could be described as exceptional. In a sector where vast valuations can be talked (and thrown) about, he’s somewhat unusual in not wanting to take external funding, preferring organic growth to getting involved with outside investors.

“Most technology company owners set out to emulate the US model of growing quickly for five to ten years and then selling,” says the chief executive of Network Critical Solutions. “I’ve not chosen to do that – I like being in charge of my own destiny. Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned but I like to think that a business can be developed to the point where it is making healthy profits without being debt-ridden. An investment house would want to see a return of 70% in three years. I’d rather grow more slowly and incrementally.”

He concedes that his position creates more of a challenge because the business can’t always afford to jump at opportunities. Hartrup shrugs. “If we’re making money we can grow, and if we’re not, we don’t.”

Network Critical produce easy to deploy devices for monitoring and securing computer networks, ensuring that the tools used by e-commerce retailers, for example, are making their networks run as efficiently as possible.

The company’s offerings enable customers to optimise performance, compliance and security insights. “In other words,” says Hartrup, “we put their tools on steroids. Some of those tools have cost them hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of pounds. We make sure customers get value from that investment.

“We like to be deemed as different because we make it all as simple as possible while the

was their fastest ever software implementation.“It’s really hard to grow 400% in two years

without burning investors’ cash,” says Hale. He’s perfectly comfortable with this and says the investors are too. How does it feel to preside over that kind of growth? “It’s exhilarating but terrifying,” replies Hale. “Any pressure comes partly from the sense of responsibility to investors who fund the business. We’re dealing with other people’s money. I was at a dinner last year with an investor and he gave me a cheque for £50,000. His daughter asked what it was for and he replied ‘it’s part of your inheritance’. She looked at me and said ‘don’t lose it’.”

Hale doesn’t intend to. “We’ve all seen companies that have grown too fast but at the expense of losing control. We’re cautious. Some businesses in our position would be aiming to diversify into new products or acquisitions to speed up growth but for us the ethos is simple. We’ve only ever done one thing because this is what we do.”

One challenge for Fairsail is visibility, in other words marketing. “We do well once we’re in a competitive process but not at getting into that process in the first place,” says Hale. “Until a couple of years ago it was all word of mouth; then we decided to be more proactive.”

But lack of market opportunity is not one of the barriers, says Hale. “The market’s significant – no-one knows how many mid-sized businesses there are but one estimate is that there are half a million globally. We had an enquiry only last week from the Marshall Islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. When the Marshall Islands – most people don’t even know where they are located – are thinking about HR systems, you know just how huge the potential market is.

“That enquiry made us realise that we’ve barely penetrated the market, especially when you consider that a survey a year ago suggested that 76% of firms were planning to change their HR systems.”

Staffing hasn’t been too much of an issue, helped by the fact that every employee, regardless of seniority, has share options. “I don’t want two classes of people,” says

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ready to ship and everyone here was buzzing. But we didn’t get it; there were perhaps too many tiers involved and the main contractor didn’t feel there was enough margin in it for them.”

In theory, a “deflated” Hartrup could have cut the vendor out of the deal and gone direct, but he says: “You live and die by the sword and we want a long-term relationship with them.”

One major challenge is getting the business community to actually understand what it is that the company actually provides. “We engage with the engineering fraternity - network architects are the people we need to influence - but sometimes I think we should be shooting higher, at CIO level, to talk about the benefits,” muses Hartrup. “But there are only so many hours in the day, and we can only knock on so many doors. It can be difficult anyway as most people in IT don’t really appreciate what we do – that’s partly due to others in the field trying to keep it a black art.”

But things are changing. “Now that competitors have been swallowed up by corporations who want to offer a soup-to-nuts offering, the message is getting out; they’re doing some of the marketing and PR for us.”

Another challenge is finding qualified staff. “We don’t seem to be training people in this country so we have to recruit a certain number in India,” says Hartrup. “In the US, they seem to be producing more software people. Here, we seem to be breeding graduates who want to be in the games industry but not in switching and networks. And the experts are in and around Cambridge – the Thames Valley is seen as where the sales operations are based rather than R&D.” And being a small tech firm in the UK doesn’t have the kudos it has in the US. “Over there it’s ‘rah rah rah’ and talented young people are excited to go and work for them,” Hartrup observes. “Here, they tend not to want to work for a company simply because they perceive it to be small.”

Hartrup hopes to double turnover from about £7million over the next two years and in five years he’d like it to be well north of £25million. This growth could come partly through

competition make it as complicated as possible. Our central ethos is to make it almost child’s play.”

He explains that in rather the same way that every electrical appliance in a house goes to the central point of the fuse box, so all the network monitoring devices go to a central point on the computer for ease of use – rather than the user having to access separate tools.

That means that some tool vendors see Network Critical as damaging their market (because they reduce the need for tools) but those who are more forward-thinking see them as positive in that they highlight the importance of investing in quality tools.

Network Critical are one of only two independents left in the field, after a bout of acquisitions by corporates. Not only do such rivals have huge buying power and marketing machines, says Hartrup, but he has had to fight them for reduced customer budgets. “Believe it or not, some companies which are looking to reduce costs consider spending in our area to be a luxury,” he says.

But Hartrup senses that being small has some advantages. Client companies often leave the purchase to the equivalent of the last minute. “Our size means we’re more flexible and nimble, but any development is customer driven. We don’t just make devices and hope to find a market; if we hear vendors need something we try to fulfil it. If we see opportunities we can get to market relatively quickly - if we can afford to. The solutions of our competitors who are working with conglomerates tend to be large-scale and expensive.”

Because they don’t sell in huge quantities, Network Critical Solutions are able to source most manufacturing in the UK, using local companies for physical assembly. About 30% of sales are direct to end-user companies, often in financial services, mobile telephony and increasingly online retail. The rest are to resellers, which isn’t the percentage Hartrup would prefer. It’s a route to market which he believes can actually cost the company sales.

“A vendor had verbally promised us a particular deal,” he recalls. “Everything was

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Re-inventing theproduct offeringTwice in three years Prisym ID have managed to re-invent themselves - as well as their products. Strategic changes have included the move from being a custom software provider to delivering a configurable standard product, and shifting from selling their software from the UK into delivering consultancy and services from their expanding US operation where the majority of their clients are based. An in addition, they’ve moved into the pharmaceutical market from their medical device base.

Until three years ago it used to be that every system was customised, says chief executive Mick Daw, but the problem with that was the expense, time and increased opportunities for error involved. “So we defined a core product, configurable in multiple ways, which is easier to deliver and maintain. Customers like it because they feel more secure on a core platform.”

The company provides software that enables clients - in life sciences, healthcare, automotive, chemical and manufacturing but mainly suppliers of medical devices (anything from artificial joints, implants, drips and catheters to Zimmer frames and beds) - to label their products in such a way that they can be tracked and, if necessary, recalled much more easily.

“Labelling is an integral component within the manufacturing production process,” says Daw. “And medical device manufacturers are heavily regulated, particularly by the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA). So in the medical device sector, nothing is delivered without a label and if that label is wrong there can be severe ramifications. A product recall can cost a company millions of pounds and damage its reputation.”

The company grew out of a project in 2000 for a pharmaceutical company which needed to make changes to its labelling to be compliant with FDA regulations. Prisym had the IP to the project and this was the basis for their subsequent software development.

acquisition, he says. The company would already be much closer to those targets had its partner in the US - where all the competition is based - not left and set up on his own. “It was disappointing and I felt let down,” says Hartrup. “We had been doing fairly well in the US. But these things happen in business,” he goes on philosophically. “You move on in the hope there will be other opportunities.”

Having spent two years turning the US situation around, Network Critical Solutions now have a new team of twelve of so in Atlanta, and have produced a record month of sales. The company also has an office in Amsterdam.

Another growth opportunity will come from working in partnership with companies which offer complementary products. “We’re agnostic in terms of who it is,” says Hartrup. “We feel there’s a big market opportunity for a small UK technology company to work strategically with big companies, such as a Vodafone, on a project basis.”

So he’s optimistic about the future. “We’re also seeing opportunities with the trend of ‘dash to the edge’, he says, meaning that security concerns over network intrusion have led to companies wanting to monitor not just the centre of networks but also the periphery. And as the SaaS model grows, there are more data centres being built and more networks to monitor, which is good news for Network Critical.

Priorities now include bringing out a unified system, and connecting multiple devices together. “Fabric [in computer jargon, the way different parts of something work together to form a single entity] is the buzz word at the moment from a technology standpoint,” observes Hartrup.

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can assume they will have automatic priority and can be reluctant to take advice.”

What’s rewarding, says Daw, is working with customers who do recognise the limitations of their knowledge and allow Prisym ID to do the job. “We’ve taken four or five big clients from one competitor who couldn’t get it right. One came to us and said ‘you’re the experts, tell us what to do’. Another said we saved them $21million a year in terms of cost reductions arising from reduced recalls.”

Prisym are now a market leader, albeit that the label life-cycle management solutions market is a fragmented one. “It’s difficult to put a number on it but I would have thought we have less than 10 per cent of the market,” says Daw. “But we’re the biggest in the market and we get involved in most projects in this incestuous industry. You can guarantee that in most projects someone on the client side will have worked with us or knows someone who has.”

The business also benefits from significant customer loyalty, partly because the cost to customers of the software (average sales are $500,000 to $1.5million, then on top of that customers have the cost of rolling out their project and FDA compliance), means that once clients choose Prisym ID they tend to stay. Turnover has been steady at about £6million for four years, but Daw thinks that with recent investment in the sales team and processes it will now improve pretty rapidly – though more meaningful than turnover is EBIT. Last year it was over £million. “We have the product, we have the market, so in five years if we continue to invest in product and people there’s no reason why EBIT shouldn’t be £5million, if not a bit higher,” says Daw. One issue for the business though is the sheer length of time it takes for revenue and hence profit to filter through. The gestation period for a sale could be up to eighteen months or even longer; then a project can take up to a year to get up and running, although the configuration rather than custom software approach will shorten the timelines.

Daw knows the company, which is owned by the management team, could be of interest to a

Daw joined in 2002 as part of an “intensive care” rescue operation after a failed venture capital buyout. He recalls it as a very political time, with the investors and banks fighting each other. “I couldn’t even get them into the same room,” he says. He proceeded to buy the company with the management team, and they developed the labelling offering which focused increasingly on the medical devices sector. The product wasn’t perfect, he says. “Like most software packages, it had to be developed over time and the customisation nature of our work meant we were developing different products for each customer.”

So three years ago Prisym ID rebuilt the product from scratch, based on the knowledge they had gained of the medical device sector. “This cost us a fortune and dented our profits but as we had ended up being probably the most knowledgeable company in the world through our previous deliveries, we felt we needed to exploit that.”

At times cash was tight and the directors had to inject personal savings into working capital. A labelling division supporting suppliers to M&S was sold off to finance the re-organisation. “This has not been an easy ride” says Daw, “but we fiercely fought to avoid outside investment and the associated obligations and interference and it’s a great feeling owing nothing to outside investors.”

Along the way there has been a growing focus on consultancy. “Until a couple of years ago we would have said we were a software company with some consultancy,” says Daw. “Now the big focus is the service side.” But that proposition needs selling in and Prisym ID aren’t the only technology company which hasn’t been great at exploiting their product, reputation and client list.

Daw speaks of “massive” growth in the medical devices sector, due to the ageing population and the growing middle class in India and China. He’s not complacent though. “For a small British company selling to household names there are two issues,” says Daw. “Prospective clients still question whether we’re big enough, and very large companies

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stayed firm – we had to crack it and in the end we succeeded.”

That led to the first passport reader with an interface which provided a better image quality than the competition. “It meant a lot of R&D and grey hair,” recalls Nakach. “The main challenge was to change the mindset that it was too difficult. Culture, how you can turn challenges into opportunities, is the most difficult thing to develop in an organisation, even if it’s a technology company. Now we have a product that’s really unique and was an instant success when it was introduced; so our people can now see the value in doing difficult things.”

And that’s good from a hiring and personal development perspective since the company can offer the chance to do “genuinely interesting” work. For example, Nakach says there’s some “very exciting” technology evolving around biometrics. The technology could enable individuals at airports, for example, to be identified by their face or their fingerprints and tracked and allowed - or not allowed - into certain areas without the need for paper documents. Eventually, he believes, biometrics could replace paper passports altogether.

“The era of e-everything has changed the paradigm of product generation,” says Nakach. “In the past manufacturers would produce products and customers would buy. But the e-generation demands service and manufacturers have to meet that requirement.

“When people go into airports they don’t want to print a boarding pass. Right now it’s available on your phone; that’s a little bit better but you still have to get it out at the airport. I want it to be even more simple. I want to show up and tap my phone, and going forward I want BA [British Airways] to have my face or fingerprint so they know it’s me.”

“The challenge with this kind of evolving technology, he says, is to identify what knowledge, competences and skills are going to be required, and bring those to the business, possibly in collaboration with other companies. “What do we source, what do we innovate and develop in house, knowing that our combination

potential buyer. “If someone came and made us an offer we couldn’t refuse, fine, if they don’t, fine,” he says. “We don’t lie awake thinking about it; we’re trying to make the business as successful as we can, not to sell it but to build something exceptional for the future. The team has been together a long time and the challenge now is to take the business to the next level.”

Essential part oftech culturePersevering to develop seemingly impossible technology can mean having to overcomea natural human tendency to give up once it becomes apparent that there doesn’t seem to be a way to make it happen.

“It has to be an essential part of a technology company’s culture,” says Guy-Franck Nakach, managing director of Access Interfacing Solutions, which make products that capture and transfer information. Operating in more than seventy countries, their customers include airports, retail banks, point-of-sale providers, and public transport operators.

“Developing technology is a mix of opportunities and relentless hard work,” explains Nakach. “You need to look for innovation but in the process you sometimes just stumble upon it, usually from a curve ball that someone throws. You need to do more than listen to customers. You’ve got to be prepared to considers things that might sound a bit crazy. Many companies tend to automatically dismiss things that sound far-fetched, so there’s an opportunity here to gain a point of difference.”

And he provides a for instance: passport readers. “We had ideas which would deliver something genuinely different,” says Nakach. “On paper the spec wasn’t practical to design and implement. So we had to crack some technical issues and didn’t know whether it was physically possible or if the technology existed. There were times when the engineers were prepared to throw in the towel but we

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“Some competitors do what we do but individually. Where we are possibly unique is in combining them,” says Nakach. “What it also gives us is a balanced source of revenue, which should provide economic resilience.” Similarly, revenue is broadly spread across the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific; only 15% of turnover is from the UK.

Arguably there are opportunities for Access Interfacing Solutions wherever there is a coming together of ID and security, even in car rental for example, where currently customers have to queue and wait to have their documents checked manually.

“We used to react to opportunities - and still do at times - but in the background there’s now a long-term plan to drive markets and verticals,” says Nakach. “We choose our markets rather

of technology and IP makes us attractive to customers?”

So, does Access see themselves in the future as a leader or a follower? “That’s an interesting question,” replies Nakach. “We like to think that we lead; it’s a cultural thing, we’re undergoing a transformation to become a leader. We’ve come from a reactive attitude to deciding up front which markets to target, what features and benefits and therefore what products to put on the table - and that puts us in the innovation space. That’s brings more risk of course.”

The business has several core areas: bar code reading, RFID/NFC technology (the process by which items are uniquely identified using radio waves), image processing, and specialist keyboards (from where the business started in 1985).

Guy-Franck Nakach, Access Interfacing Solutions

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but an issue is what are they doing; are they working effectively? As workers become more mobile they are increasingly difficult to manage and you get into the nebulous area of performance management. It’s hard enough if they’re in the office but nigh on impossible if you can’t see them.”

The system is deployed by companies which have a large workforce out on the road, whether that’s engineers, retail delivery drivers, taxi drivers or market researchers. Customers include TfL (which uses the system to manage its revenue protection officers), taxi firm Addison Lee, and a new facilities management client which will use a Cognito system to keep track of its 1500+ building engineers.

“Field workers have a pivotal role to play in delivering service, but if managers are to influence the quality of the customer service experience, they need to be able to see what’s really going on in the field at all times - and drive the desired behaviours,” Alderson explains.

Far from having Big Brother overtones, the company’s Fieldforce iQ system can really benefit the most effective workers, he maintains. “It revealed to a boiler manufacturer for example, that they had an engineer who was consistently putting in extra work, that he was successfully achieving service-level agreements and fixing his jobs well. Often people like him get forgotten about because they’re doing everything right, but that’s the sort of person a company should want to identify and motivate and energise.”

He expands on this. “I’ve been dipping my toe in the theories of Deming [William Edwards Deming was an American engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer and management consultant]. He said you needed to put in place a tiering system so people feel good and can progress. Those principles apply just as much to an organisation like ours as they do to a production line. If you can’t observe and measure you are nowhere, and of course a production line is easier to observe and measure than remote field workers. An experiment from the thirties showed that once you start to measure things they get better.”

than happen to work in them by accident.” Nakach headed a management buy-out which completed in October 2015, funded by Mobeus Equity Partners, which will accelerate the growth plans. “Their expectations are completely aligned with ours,” he says, “and they try to help through their networks. It seems to be working as a team rather than as ‘them and us’.

“Growing a company at pace, the realisation that as a small business you can make a difference in a big market, is exciting,” observes Nakach, who likens it to climbing mountains. “You reach the top of one and then every January you have to climb the next one which has a higher peak.”

Defining theprime purposeIs the prime focus of a technology business the actual product or is it more about the application of the technology? Or should it be both? “We have had various conversations around whether we are a product or a service business,” says Steve Alderson, who is senior vice-president for service operations at cloud-based mobile workforce management software provider Cognito.

Historically, says Alderson, the answer was the product. “Now we’re going more towards tech-enabled, which is more consultancy and service-based. It’s about what the client can get out of it rather than the bits and pieces behind it.”

Cognito started in the 1990s, focusing on mobile data communications, but as more and more players piled into that market they later decided a specialism was needed to avoid becoming a “commodity, much like everyone else.”

So in 2012 the company “morphed” into software to monitor the performance of mobile workforces. Alderson explains why this was seen as an area of potential. “It’s relatively simple to communicate with mobile workers

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without such planning sometimes companies can over-respond to some customers at the expense of others. An engineer is on a call and they might want to be able to respond positively to a customer’s ‘while you’re here, can you just….’, but you can’t run a business like that,” says Alderson. “In terms of customer service it seems counter intuitive to say ‘I can’t do that just now’, but that’s only seeing it from the perspective of that one customer; most of us understand that there’s a system somewhere that in the grander scheme of things is trying to do the right thing for everyone.”

Alderson identifies marketing and people as key challenges to growth. “If you have an innovation that the market doesn’t understand you have to tell them about it, otherwise you’re relying on them having a voyage of discovery and then seeking you out. But technology companies aren’t always the best at marketing. What we weren’t getting across in our outgoing material is that we’re experts in enabling a company to be able to visualise the performance of its mobile workers.”

With about 120 staff, Alderson’s main concern is the difficulty of obtaining the right people. “I get a bit angsty about this because we’re going to need people with real capabilities and experience who can visualise things, design, architect and build them and put them into action - and quickly enough to have a real impact. We need systems with really superb visual interaction and pretty significant levels of engineering. People have to be the core driver and factor in that innovation.”

Alderson thinks the teaching of IT in schools needs to get up to speed. “I think we’re suffering from the failure of successive governments over the past twenty years,” he maintains. “I was a product of the 1970s grammar school generation and we were doing basic programming even then. In the 1980s this country was at the forefront of putting computers into schools but now... I’ve been to school parents’ evenings and been horrified at the quality of the teaching in ICT. The fact that so many children use tablets and mobiles proficiently is somewhat of a red herring which

Cognito’s sector has evolved from “very simple” early systems to ones that are “nightmarishly complex,” including the so-called ‘dynamic resource scheduling’ of the mid to late noughties. This was based on the principle that “you threw everything in and it came up with the ideal schedule”, says Alderson. “But of course real life takes over. DRS has a pretty poor reputation. At a technical level it works but it relies on the quality of the data you feed it, and there are horrific examples of ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’. Then there’s was a much more insidious fundamental problem. If a field worker decided to do the appointments in a different order for example, the whole thing would be blown out of the water.”

Whether the pitch is the product or service, the common denominator for all software providers, says Alderson, is constant evolution. “The aim is to keep innovating and adapting to change. One of the obstacles is that technology moves from brand new, different and exciting to commodified and everyday very quickly.” There can be conflicting dynamics. “If you’re a long-running business you carry on with the same customers and you have to satisfy their needs but that can work against being able to innovate,” he explains.

The next step for Cognito has been to enable clients to use the data to create performance analytics, which enhances the value of the information. For example, instead of capturing just whether a worker has completed a job it tracks everything they’ve done, and the time taken.

Break handling is an interesting area, says Alderson. “If you’re scheduling work you have to build in a break from a working hours or health and safety perspective but workers might want to work through and then get off home earlier.”

So does that mean removing the worker’s ability to act on their own initiative to solve problems? “That’s not a new potential dilemma created by the software,” answers Alderson. “Right now, drivers don’t have a lot of choice about where they go next with EPOD (electronic proof of delivery) systems. And

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for it to be viable, there’s one vital component - that first big customer. NGD had the building lined up, a source of potential finance, and a likely big customer in the form of a telecoms giant.

“It was a case of getting everything aligned,” says Razey. “The landlords said they would rent us the building if the customer was on board; the customer said they would if we got the building, and financiers said they would provide the funds if we got the telecoms company as a customer. ”

The building itself is earthquake-proof, provides 750,000sqft of space (as big as Heathrow Terminal 5, says Razey to put that into context), is served by its own electricity substation and is big enough for probably twenty years of growth. It had long been empty after the intended occupant, electronics giant LG, pulled out when the Korean stock market collapsed in 1998.

Turnover at Next Generation Data is now over £11million (£4million of which is pre-tax profit) and Razey is looking for £17million next year (£6.5million of which will be profit). “Now it’s about turning the handle,” he says. If, or when as Razey would have it, the building is full, the business would be worth some £700million.

The company has ten global corporate customers, and some thirty smaller ones. A challenge in marketing terms is that because customers don’t want to talk about where their data is held, NGD are not allowed to publicise new sign-ups.

Razey sees the company as sitting somewhere between IT and electrical engineering. He explains: “Things are changing all the time in IT, but in engineering, equipment is more of a constant. So we have the best of both worlds - a high-growth industry with equipment that will last forever.”

The only downside, he says, is that in such a fast-moving sector, customers tend to want flexibility and short-term contracts. “That’s challenging when you just invested millions in the equipment,” he says. “It can create a certain amount of tension.”

leads adults to assume they are IT literate. Yes they use them, but they don’t know how they work”.

For two years, Cognito ran a project called CHIPS (Cognito Helping Improve Programming in Schools) but they decided to call a halt - because not enough schools were interested.

Breaking clear from the clusterWhere’s the best place to set up a data centre - with all the others in Docklands or in splendid isolation at the end of the M5 at a location which involves crossing the Severn Bridge?

A no-brainer for Next Generation Data. “Initially our move was considered bonkers because of the trend for data centres to be clustered together in that one area of London continues,” says founder and chief executive Nick Razey, though whether that’s through “momentum or habit” is unclear.

Certainly, he says, the original reason – that connectivity is cheaper if you all cluster together – no longer holds true. Though at one time the cost of connectivity in their chosen location was too high to make such a project viable, it has since come down significantly while the cost of power in London – along with property prices plus employment costs and churn – has gone up, making the capital less of an ideal location to store mission-critical data.

All that, he claims, now makes the company the lowest-cost business in its sector. “Our prediction was that it would be all about power and through buying renewables we have loads of it. We have forty-five megawatts, which is enormous by most standards.” Meanwhile, he says, London rivals have been experiencing difficulties with connection to the grid. “I don’t think they believe we’re mad now,” Razey suggests, with perhaps a touch of schadenfreude.

But to make it happen, Next Generation Data had to assemble a kind of virtuous circle. And

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TripAdvisor. And here at Next Generation Data we have some sixty people who have jobs and salaries. I get great pleasure from thinking ‘I was one of the guys who made that happen’. You might not believe this, but that gives me more of a buzz than simply making money.”

Discovering the next big thingThere’s nothing Mike Simmonds likes more than wandering around technology exhibitions overseas, chatting to the assembled inventors and developers. His mission is to find out if their new ideas could be adopted by his company, solutions provider and systems integrator Axial Systems.

“I might find a small company, run by one man out of his garage in San Jose, which has developed a unique piece of technology,” he says. “I’ll identify whether our customers could use it and if so we will form a technical and commercial relationship with him and bring the product to the UK and our customers. I love bringing innovation to customers, technology which will potentially help them save inordinate amounts of money, so we are constantly looking for innovative products which could be best of breed and market leading.”

Simmonds is also on the advisory boards of a number of the companies that are represented by Axial in the UK, giving his feedback on current products and advice on future roadmaps

One that really worked out was Gigamon, producers of intelligent network visibility solutions, which Axial brought to this country nine years ago.

One which didn’t was a product that monitored power consumption with a view to turning off devices when they were not being used. “It was fantastic,” says Simmonds. “It would have paid for itself within months, and we spent probably three years discussing it, but it just didn’t get any traction. But I can see that particular raft coming round again

Which does provide a not inconsiderable barrier to entry though - the only one it would appear. Razey points to the interesting fact that the data centre industry is not regulated. “Yet it’s such a critical sector,” he observes. “I’m not saying I want regulation; my life is probably easier without it, but anyone can set up a data centre. Well, anyone who’s got £10million or more.”

A private equity investment is acquiring 51% of Next Generation Data, while Razey and his partner, chairman Simon Taylor, will cash in some shares but stay with the company for at least another three years.

So what will Razey do then? “I will be sixty by that time,” he muses. “It would be nice to invest in other start-ups and I would like to go into schools and talk to kids about running their own businesses. When I was at school we were told ‘study hard, get your qualifications then join a company’. No one ever said we could start one of our own. This country needs to be more entrepreneurial, and it needs to start in the classroom.”

Having a business partner he says has been vital. “I would hate to be on my own; it would be very lonely,” he says. “And a business needs ying and yang. Just as a chess player’s moves are pre-planned carefully while the poker player gambles on gut instinct, you need both sides of the brain in business. Simon and I are total opposites in every way so we never get complacent as we think about things in different ways. He’s creative, charismatic, while I’m always saying ‘what about the numbers’?”

Not that he’s risk averse. “Financial guys tend to be focused on perfecting the now and totally ignore tomorrow,” he says. “They can always find a reason not to do things. Entrepreneurs are prepared to say ‘let’s just do this and see what happens’. You shouldn’t be afraid to fail; if you screw up, you can usually fix it.”

Razey says what drives him personally is that he likes putting things together and making them into something. “I built a hotel in Brazil,” he says surprisingly by way of illustration. “I bought a piece of land and turned it into something that people write about on

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company has been doing is to create “a package of value to the customer.”

“The idea of cross fertilising, putting various products and services in a wrapper, is becoming much more common,” says Simmonds. “Security products, wireless, performance reporting, networks, all touch and integrate with each other at various levels. If the customer has a security requirement, for example, they may also need to monitor what goes in and out of their network, and might also want to record their network-based phone calls.”

But the challenge remains of selling in what can be a price-driven market. Hence an ethos of selling not just the tin but the value inside it. “Anyone can sell anything as long as they’re cheaper than the next company,” says Simmonds. He thinks the “solution consumers” usually understand the concept of value, but face opposition from price-obsessed procurement departments. “The people we

now there is renewed interest in this area.” Innovative products are one of the four layers in a defined strata of product types sold by Axial. The other are strategic, tactical and opportunistic. Strategic products are “go-to” options from well-known brands like McAfee (acquired recently by Intel Security), and Net Optics (ditto, by Ixia) which Axial package up with others to achieve a customer requirement result.

Tactical products, for example network switches and routers, augment the strategic ones. And opportunistic products? “Everything else,” replies Simmonds. “Customers might ring us up with a specific requirement but without knowing which product will best meet it.”Axial will stick to their role is as a solutions provider and systems integrator – Simmonds says they don’t want to manufacture. However, he doesn’t want the company to be “just a simple distributor of stuff” either. So what the

Mike Simmonds, Axial Systems

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says Simmonds. Turnover was £19million in 2014 (EBITDA £1million), £22million in 2015 (EBITDA £1.4million) and is on target currently. “I’m quite pleased with progress,” says Simmonds. “We’re ahead of the curve”.

New requirementsdefine locationOverview Wendy Hart, Advisory Partner, Grant Thornton

“The delivery of software or infrastructure through the ‘as a service’ model is making it easier for ambitious technology businesses to scale quickly and globally from anywhere,” explains Wendy Hart, advisory partner at Grant Thornton.

“The cloud has transformed the way that technology businesses can work because it has also introduced real flexibility. The level of capital investment required to build a sustainable operation has reduced and developments in technology over the last ten years have made it possible for a new business to be ‘located’ almost anywhere.

“With the flexibility of location that the cloud delivers to businesses, where a company is sited today has more to do with the availability of skilled and experienced resource and less about servers and data centres. The Thames Valley became a technology hub during a different age, when tech giants like Oracle and Microsoft chose Reading for their UK headquarters. Their investment in building a pool of skilled staff has paid long term dividends for the region and has acted as a magnet for a plethora of technology businesses, large and small.

“But will such a concentration of resource and experience continue to be enough to attract businesses to areas with overcrowded roads and high house prices, now that business models and technology can support remote collaboration and home-working? As the next generation of businesses based on new

work with want a solution to their problem, but I have known ‘purchasing’ to want four quotes, and the lowest one wins so the value proposition can be diluted. Everyone has to be on board with why something is the best solution for them.”

And he says it’s important to spend a lot of time with customers in order to understand their pain points. “The approach has to be consultative. If they’re looking for something that does X, Y and Z and at that point I can’t help them, that’s my cue to go looking for something that will.” What helps, he suggests, is that because he has a technology background (he joined Axial in 2007 as technical director, becoming MD in 2013), suppliers are prepared to share early information with him about products in development.

With a staff complement of over fifty, Axial have been taking sales people from outside the IT industry and training them in technology in order to keep pace with expansion. What the company is not keen on is knee-jerk hiring just to fill a seat. “One of the sound bites I give about hiring is that I would rather it was right than right now,” says Simmonds. “I’m a stickler. I don’t want people who simply want a job. I want people to join us because they want a career. I don’t necessarily want them to want my job but I do want them to have a desire to develop their skills and abilities.”

The hiring process starts with an informal chat, then candidates are asked to come back and give a presentation about “something that has value.” It’s a way of seeing how their minds work, says Simmonds. “Some ask what I mean by value, and I say you tell me. I want people who can think for themselves.” He doesn’t do psychometric testing. “I’d rather recruit on merit and how well people are going to fit in,” he says.

Half of the business is owned by venture capital investors Northern Venture Management since an MBO seven years ago. They’ve given the business a share of a chairman and former owner Paul Spencer has stayed on as a non-exec. “The investors are hands off but very inquisitive, which is a perfect balance,”

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Culturally though, it can be a real challenge to break into the US market. It is often difficult to strike a balance between UK control and a US ‘personality’.”

Making a differenceis now essentialOverview Roland Emmans,UK Tech Sector Leader, NatWest

If the battle for talent is the major concern of technology companies in the south, then remuneration isn’t the magic bullet. The new generation of technologists need to know they are making a difference, so it’s about involvement, engagement, the automation of boring tasks so there is more intellectual challenge for staff. We are seeing a lot more automation in both software and technology processes and one of the drivers is the need to move talent from mundane to higher value work.

“The key is whether a technology company actually understands the aspirations of its staff and how they can be met. Without having that knowledge it is all too easy to go down the wrong path. My belief is that we are going to see more of a ‘work when it’s right for you’ approach. Why does everyone need to be in the office at nine in the morning? I suppose there is still a big piece about trust in there, but if a technology company is struggling to retain staff who are prepared to leave for a few extra pounds a week, then it might be beneficial to look at the culture of its business.

“One of the sector trends is a greater unification between IT and telecoms. A reason is that SMEs are more comfortable with convergence and are looking to have just one provider. Traditionally, a telecoms provider has been different from an IT company, but I would say that it’s been more of a cultural issue because technically you could argue they are

technologies and newer working practices establishes and grows, we might see the south east as a hub start to erode, coupled with ever increasing levels of off-shoring to support growth in a skills-constrained UK. Already offshoring is increasingly as much about bolstering capability as about saving overhead, though the cost advantage continues to be a significant factor for now.

“As technology businesses establish and grow, are they going to be able to find the skills locally that they require to expand? In stark contrast to many other countries, there seems to be a disconnect between the skills the economy requires and the education being delivered in our schools and universities. With a much greater focus on acquiring the most marketable technology skillsets (which obviously change over time), our graduates are, in many cases, competing with highly motivated and targeted competition from overseas students. Reflecting now on the skills and training that we need our working population to have over the next decade, and then acting to implement whatever change is required, would be time well spent to ensure that the pool of talent here continues to attract businesses and capital to the region in the longer term.

“And what about the ambition of our home-grown businesses? In a technology market where products, and increasingly services, can be purchased from anywhere for delivery anywhere, it isn’t possible to scale fully as a purely UK business. For young companies, that transition to overseas sales and overseas locations can be a challenge and one which typically happens much earlier than it used to. But then building a global business is a challenge of logistics, resource and risk management, and it is very easy to fall foul of overseas tax legislation and cultural norms.

“For aspiring technology companies, the US market remains the holy grail because it is a massive market and it’s where many of the acquirers for a UK technology business naturally sit. Some success in the US market can be a pre-condition for a high valuation if a business is seeking investment or exit.

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the technology company has customers on that basis in, say, Australia, then because of the time difference they will need to be a twenty-four-hour operation in the UK or have an office out there.

“In the technology sector I don’t think cash is the constraint it might have been three years ago for an ambitious company, although there can still be a gap between friends and family funding and equity finance.

“An interesting psychological question is at what stage is a technology entrepreneur prepared to sell a stake in their business? The value to an entrepreneur will be different from the figure investors have in mind because they are working on different timelines. I think the UK is applying a more Silicon Valley approach, with successful technology entrepreneurs who have made money either investing or applying their intellectual horsepower as a mentor or in a non-exec role to encourage the next generation of technology businesses.

“This might change the scenario of the fledgling UK technology company which manages to develop, prove, and then package, but at that relatively early stage in its life is then bought out by an American corporate.

“What is important is that we need a density of technology companies in the south. Yes, we have seen some companies moving operations from the south to Manchester for example because there is a perception, rightly or wrongly, that it’s cheaper and easier to find talent there. But the reason why London became the fintech hub of the world for example is that we have a critical mass of worldclass companies in that sector and Heathrow and Gatwick provide instant connectivity.”

compatible. The rationale is why should they just sell one ‘product’ when they can provide both. The customer gets a better deal, and the company has a lower churn rate. What is interesting is that there is both push from the industry and pull from users because actually it reduces costs for both at the end of the day.

“Protection is another high agenda item. Arguably there are two types of businesses.Those which have been hacked and those which are unaware they’ve been hacked. As more business is over the internet, so the exposure is inevitably greater, but cyber security is not just about technology. Companies need competent, trained people applying the simple rules to avoid getting caught out.

“Data management is becoming even more of an issue and that is being driven by legislative changes. For example, businesses can be fined by up to 5% of global turnover for each breach under EU regulations to be applied in 2017.

“The overlay to all this is the speed at which the market is moving. For technology companies that can mean getting the product out there even though it isn’t going to be perfect; the last bit of software development for example will be by the customer who uses it. The dilemma is whether you provide something the market is already prepared for or do you introduce something left field in the hope that the market will come to you. The first tablet was produced by Microsoft in 1992 but consumers weren’t ready for it.

“The US is a natural market for ambitious technology companies because of its sheer size and its maturity. And although British technology has got a good reputation, often the point of entry is still when a customer in the UK asks their provider to do something for its New York office.

“On one level, selling globally has never been more possible. Software language is agnostic, data analytics is an example, and conversion to a different spoken language can be quite simple. But if UK technology companies are selling software as a service to other countries, can the buyer be supported? If software is sold as a service, instant support is essential, and if

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picture of people deliberately being malicious, but so many problems arise from people just not doing the right thing.

“Big data as another key area. Of course it has been around for a few years but the imperative is now much more on how to create value out of big data. That is still the fundamental challenge. So much more data is being created, which has to be managed and protected, but then how can it be used for commercial benefit? It is all about intelligent interpretation, and there is a real competitive advantage if a company is able to achieve it.

“A market sector which has significant challenges - and opportunities - relating to technology is retail, because customers want to engage across so many different channels but they expect consistently good experience across them all. Omni-channel retailing requires a company to have the ability to gather more information about the customer so that they can be sold to more intelligently, regardless of what channel they use. Another sector which is under pressure is education, where the expectations from children of junior school age, not just more technically savvy students, has never been greater. The likelihood is that they will have better IT in their pockets and at home than in the classroom. But technology can help universities attract and educate foreign students more effectively, by providing, for example, real-time translation of lectures.

“We are living in a more globalised world. Barriers to international trade have been reducing, certainly with the impact of the internet. A lot is said about UK technology companies looking to expand into the US, but there is a fundamental reason why that can be a difficult market to get into. Because there is a greater appetite for investing in IT development in the US, venture capitalists have been much more prolific with their funding, which means that a UK company can be out gunned by US competitors in terms of resource. So perhaps partnership or collaboration is a better route to market than simply taking on heavily funded indigenous competitors. A physical presence in the US will be essential; being based in the UK

Three priorities willdetermine successOverview James Kelliher, Chief Executive, The Whiteoaks Consultancy

“There are three main priorities which will determine the success of a technology company - proposition, capital, and people. Increasingly, people will be the first on the list.

“It’s not just about the need to produce more techies - every child doesn’t have to be a programmer; it’s more about developing people who can manage and deliver process. There is a lot of talk about the need for education to meet the needs of business but it’s not so simple. Technology has created a massive challenge for education because it is constantly developing. An IT course delivered today will be out of date even before the last lecture because the technology would have moved on. Turn the clock back not that many years and the core skills for people going into work hadn’t really changed for 100 years. Now people are continually needing new skills.”

“The human dimension can’t be under-stated, and cyber security as a case in point. The realisation by commercial and public sector organisations that there is both an obligation and expectation that their customers will be protected has resulted in cyber security becoming a significant growth sector, with new companies entering the market and new products being developed. What would really change the game is if there was a requirement for businesses to declare how many cyber attacks they have suffered. This all links to a broader security issue, which can be internal as well as external. Quite often when things go wrong it is down to human design or error, which isn’t necessarily malicious. It can, for example, be down to carelessness. So human behaviour management has become an essential area to understand. It is all too easy to paint a

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Reference:

Axial Systems - www.axial.co.ukCDK Global - www.cdkglobal.co.ukCelebrus - www.celebrus.comChauntry Corporation - www.chauntry.comCobalt Telephone Technologies www.ctt.co.uk Cognito IQ - www.cognitoiq.comConsult Hyperion - www.chyp.comDisplaydata - www.displaydata.com Epicor - www.epicor.comFairsail - www.fairsail.comFeefo - www.feefo.comFibercore - fibercore.comFISCAL Technologies www.fiscaltechnologies.comForfront - forfront.comHypertec - www.hypertec.co.uki2O Water - www.i2owater.comInSync Technology - www.insync.tvIntelligent Environments www.intelligentenvironments.comInvenias - invenias.comIP Integration - www.ipintegration.comLAN2LAN - www.lan2lan.com Lein Applied Diagnostics - www.lein-ad.comLogicalis - www.uk.logicalis.comLYNQ - www.thinklynq.comMicrolink PC - www.microlinkpc.com Mikkom - www.mikkom.comNetwork Critical - www.networkcritical.comNeural Technologies - www.neuralt.com Next Generation Data www.nextgenerationdata.co.ukPrisym ID - www.prisymid.comRedwood Technologies www.redwoodtech.comStaffcare - www.staffcare.netSwitch Concepts - www.switchconcepts.comUKCloud - ukcloud.comUserReplay - www.userreplay.comVigilant Applications - vigilantapps.com

and dealing with the west coast can be difficult because of the time zones. But the important thing is to work out where your target market is located.

“Of course the US is a natural market for UK companies because it’s the biggest English speaking country in the world. Conversely, that creates opportunities the other way. US companies traditionally have used the UK as their first port of call away from their shores, creating a hub from which to enter continental Europe and emerging markets beyond.

“Talking about the US opens up another debate about the development of fledgling technology companies. “We work with the London livery company for information technologists which has an entrepreneurs panel that mentors the next generation. At one of the meetings there was talk about the £5million turnover factor, the point at which a lot of founders of technology companies sell their businesses. A serial entrepreneur on the panel said he had asked a number of them ‘why did you sell you could have gone on to build an even bigger and more valuable business’? Perhaps it’s a British characteristic. In the US, they would want to get additional investment and dominate their market; they start with that desire to dominate rather than an intention to reach a certain level.

“The British mentality is that start-up businesses are good and the media and government are friendly towards them, but there seems to be a point when the company is successful that the goodwill and support evaporates. Upscaling a technology business is a challenge. Tax becomes more onerous, processes become more difficult, but we need to encourage success and help companies achieve their potential to be global leaders. I think the more successful companies have a common trait in that their owners are genuinely passionate about what they are creating. They talk about product not turnover projections or an exit strategy. Their intention is to make money, but by changing the world.”

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Whiteoaks’ innovative proposition is specifically-designed for fast-growth businesses seeking tangible, business-led results from their PR investment.A recent Whiteoaks survey of more than 150 companies in the technology sector revealed some surprising attitudes to PR ROI and specifically how PR outputs can link to business outcomes.

More than three-quarters (76%) said that demonstration of ROI is their top priority when looking to buy PR services. Yet despite this, just 32% of those currently using an agency have any methodology in place to establish a link between what they are paying for and the business outcomes they want.

Alarmingly, more than four-fifths (81%) said that when they buy PR services, they do not expect a method of showing ROI.

Whiteoaks sees things differently. Fast-Track PR enables clients to benefit from a completely transparent results-driven

engagement model with set fees for agreed campaign deliverables, qualitative and quantitative performance targets and formal service level agreements providing pro-rata fee rebates if targets are not achieved. Combined, these elements deliver guaranteed results for organisations investing in public relations to fuel business success.

Comprising Whiteoaks’ core differentiators, Fast-Track PR campaigns are designed to optimise growth-orientated results for clients. These include robust reporting methods to show value and return at each stage of the campaign, solid relationships with key industry influencers for fast turnaround on engagement and skills-based teams that guarantee consistency in quality of outputs.

Current clients benefitting from Fast-Track PR approach have seen outstanding PR results leading to tangible business outcomes, including attracting new venture capital investments, successful acquisitions and achieving major funding rounds.

Xero, an accounting software company, recently experienced the effectiveness of the Fast-Track PR proposition. Within 12-months of engaging Whiteoaks both its media coverage and number of customers in the UK more than doubled, leading to Xero now being independently-recognised as the UK’s number one cloud accounting application provider for small businesses.

“We believe that challenger brand businesses in scale-up mode, along with their investors, are looking for a better way to procure PR services,” says James Kelliher, CEO at Whiteoaks (pictured left).

“Too often, PR is perceived as a cost that must be incurred to maintain the status quo. In contrast, Fast-Track PR is designed specifically for ambitious organisations seeking to establish a direct relationship between PR performance and business growth – and in a hurry. As we have already proved across those clients for whom we’re applying the Fast-Track PR campaign strategy, Whiteoaks makes it entirely possible to link performance with rapid and tangible results that lead to business outcomes.”

Fast-Track PR: Move your business up a gear with

Whiteoaks

Whiteoaks Technology PR, 24 West Street, Farnham, Surrey, UK, GU9 7DR t: +44 01252 727313 e: hello@whiteoaks.co.uk | w: whiteoaks.co.uk