A man steeped in IT expertise and business acumen - step forward Neil Cross, Managing Director of Advanced 365.
For three young visionaries - Nick Gerard, Phil Buckingham and Maurice Sutton - the rise of the PC was a moment of opportunity when ambition could be allowed its freedom. They established Advanced 365 in 1987 having identified a gap in the market to supply hardware to the City when PCs first appeared on desks. Then known as Business Systems Group (BSG), the company developed services to wrap around the products and became a purveyor of managed server and networking infrastructure.
BSG was acquired by Advanced Computer Software Group in 2009 and Advanced 365 was born, selling off the hardware resale business to focus on managed services which are the core of the business today. These include outsourcing, cloud computing, application development, support and data cleansing. "The decision to provide more services was a key turning point," said Cross. "We continue to work with organisations within the private, public and charity sectors where we help to improve their operational efficiencies, control costs, enhance productivity and enable growth."
In 2009 the company employed 100-plus staff and the core managed services business turned over circa £15 million. Today, the firm has a 350 headcount and is nudging towards £50 million. "Over the past six years we have consistently demonstrated 15-plus per cent year-on-year growth," said Cross. "By 2020 we expect Advanced 365 to more than double in size. Over 70 per cent of all services we deliver will come through the cloud and a similar volume will be consumed by mobile devices. What we have accomplished is impressive and exceeded my expectations and we have no intention of slowing down."
Consolidating a number of bespoke client platforms into a single 'build it once' cloud environment was a smart move that contributed significantly to Advanced 365's growth. "The way we worked before was simply not scaleable," commented Cross. "When we created Advanced 365 out of BSG we were still building bespoke solutions for all of our customers. But acceptance of the cloud prompted us to adapt our approach. In some cases bespoke remains the right solution, in others we host clients on our own cloud platforms, and in others we use the public cloud. We see ourselves as a service aggregator rather than a sole provider. Some of the services we aggregate include those we built for our customers while others come from our partners. We do not have a pile it high sell it cheap proposition."
One of the main drivers for growth was Advanced 365's entry into the public sector. "As we are based in the City we have a strong financial services bias," explained Cross. "But a few years ago we realised that the skill requirements to succeed in this space could be applied to the public sector which is not dissimilar. After initial success with a significant London Borough we extended our reach to a point where our business is now 50/50 between commercial and public sector engagements."
Cyber security is another growth area that Cross says is on the to-do list of all CIOs. "We are busy extending our cyber practice and shaping the company to support our growth for the next five years," he explained. "We are redefining our cloud offerings and investing significantly in new technology right across the board. Cloud and cyber security are key trends and areas where we are seeing an increase in demand from our customers. My goal is to ensure that Advanced 365 is best placed to deliver the right services at the right time for both our current and future customers."
For Advanced 365, customer loyalty is about the quality of engagement, both for clients and staff, with great service delivery breeding sticky customers. But, According to Cross, having to deal with unreliable comms firms is an industry bugbear that rankles and has become the 'curse of the project', made worse by the absolute need for the infrastructure they provide to underpin the technology that customers want to use.
In a call to hasten the day when reliable service delivery triumphs, Cross urged: "Telcos need to get into the 21st century. Everything we do is about connectivity, but getting it delivered when required and in the shape we need it is always one of the biggest project-based challenges for us. I have lost count of the number of times I have had to apologise because a telco simply did not keep their promises."
Although trouble and strife is not behind, the good news is that Cross believes there will always be a place for resellers. "However, unless they differentiate in this era of transparent purchasing they will find it difficult to turn a solid profit," he warned.
That said, ahead lie the sunny uplands for SIs able to grasp an opportunity to strengthen their proposition. "Ultimately, cloud aggregation and switching cloud providers will become a consumer activity," stated Cross. "In the meantime the industry still needs intelligent people to glue all of the components together. We all need to keep abreast of the industry. That is why I still love it. Change is constant and you never know where the next curve ball will come from."
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