Q Please can you provide a little bit of history about the company to date?
A NTS has been trading since 2002 and really built our business around being a highly skilled, innovative and versatile Cisco partner, over the years as we grew, so did our offerings. However we never lost that core of being technically adept at what we delivered. We never shy away from the complex nature of our customers demands and in some respect I am really proud of the difficulty of some of the projects we complete, we all learn from them, we gain the customers respect and we grow as a business. NTS also houses its own in house cabling division, so we really can deliver end to end without outsourcing anything to third parties. What we have needed to improve upon is letting others know just how good we are at what we do.
Q Who are the key personnel involved?
A Apart from myself, we have the MD and founder Omar Amer, he is a through and through Cisco guru and has brought in some of our largest accounts over the years. We then have a mix of technical experts in voice, networking, storage, virtualisation and the windows stack. Moving on to Account Managers, we have an incredibly experienced team, they all work together to share ideas and problem solve so it’s an excellent environment for them to work and grow. We also changed our strategy for recruiting and made the long term investment in our ‘talent engine’ where we bring in young, energetic people to train and develop in a new team. This includes our first apprentices, who have been brilliant.
Q What do you see as the overall strengths of NTS?
A Agility, technical expertise and our stability. We don’t answer to investors or shareholders, so can react quickly to market demands, and tight customer timeframes. Most of our staff hold some level of technical accreditation, even the sales guys, so speak on customers terms. We own our own offices and are looking to expand into other locations this year. So if you take the mix of financial stability, technical expertise, end to end delivery (Wifi Surveys and Cabling) and the ability to deliver complex projects simply, on budget and on time, you would struggle to find a better partner for your IT needs.
Q You have a broad solution portfolio, broken down into five
main areas. Can you tell us something about each area,
starting with infrastructure?
A Infrastructure is something we have always had the right approach to, we really don’t like trying to make a prefered vendor’s solution fit to a customer’s requirement. Even if a customer comes to us with a shopping list, we try to understand what it’s for, and if appropriate make an alternative suggestion. We have all the right partner levels with the key vendors to ensure we can offer the correct support, delivery and of course pricing, to fulfill it.
Q And then collaboration?
A This really plays to our strengths, collaboration is one of the best ways for a customer’s business to improve every element of its structure, the caveat is that it has to be done properly and actually work. It’s not just about bringing your business together, it’s about unifying the technologies to make that happen. When done right, having those advanced levels of communication enhances everything including your end customer relations, which can only be a positive outcome.
Q Followed by converged networks?
A This is about the customer taking control and gaining agility, you bring all your networking together from voice, data, wireless, even mobile under a single platform. You can also add your storage and server network into it. The outcome is tangible to those who hold the purse strings, a single management point, better utilisation, scale up and down, there is no better way of controlling these costs than to converge them onto a single platform. Cisco offers such diversty that it makes our job far simpler.
Q Moving on to secure access?
A This area is one I find really interesting, don’t get me wrong getting the firewall and end point protection working properly is still key to all we do. I think of this now more around securing from the inside out, rather than the other way around, for instance if you are paying £££’s for a secure CRM platform, only for the export of customer data to be sitting on a user’s dropbox, or a customer email list uploaded into an online survey tool, how is that compliant with data protection? We have some great tools that allow us to see what goes out of your network now, and we can report on what and who is using these kind of tools. What’s more impressive is we can allow some federated control to still use them but automate the clean up of data afterwards. Pretty cool I think.
Q And, finally, covering virtualisation?
A We still have a solid delivery of virtual environments, but we now seem to be brought in a lot to fix poorly configured or overburdened environments. What I have seen is that a lot of people in charge of a virtual environment would struggle to build one, a lot like if you asked someone who uses a database to be a SQL admin, using is far beyond configuration and fault finding. We have developed an excellent approach to assessing, creating a get well plan, and offering ongoing support for these types of customers.
Q NTS is keen to promote its X-POD solution right now. Why are
you so excited by this Cisco/X-IO combined offering?
A It’s great to be able to bring something new to market, we are one of only three partners in the UK to offer X-IO and the only one who is an ‘Elite’ Premier Plus Cisco partner. That means we have the technical expertise to design, deliver and support a unified design with these vendors. It means we can install an end to end high performance project to a customer and not lose any sleep worrying about failures or performance drop.
Q What are the advantages it offers over other, comparable
solutions?
A Firstly, it’s the worlds only self healing storage array, it’s guaranteed not to break, let me be clear, you do not buy hardware support, it comes with a 5 year warranty instead! For me that’s not even its main advantage though. What excites me is that it’s all about performance with this, no it’s not right for every customer looking at storage, but if performance is what you need, then you need to look at X-IO. Unlike a lot of vendors they don’t try to be all things to all people, they know their fit, and they fit it perfectly. Of course when you need reliability and speed of network, you wouldn’t want to look anywhere else other than Cisco. Because of the unique architecture of X-IO you don’t need shelf upon shelf of discs spinning just to produce IOPS, therefore the total cost to produce the required performance, the reduced overhead in running costs, and the removal of hardware support equal a huge saving vs traditional vendors. To guarantee transferring that data perfectly to the server estate, it’s a perfect match for Cisco.
Q We can’t not talk about Cloud and Managed Services, how is
NTS is involved in this area?
A I am glad you asked, as I mentioned earlier we have spent a while planning how we can provide a true NTS service, rather than these standardised, white labelled solutions most partners sell, if it’s not ours what value do we add? NTS flex launches officially in April 15, and it is our range of Cloud and Managed Services. What makes it unique is the way we tailor it for each and every customer. Our view is that there’s no point selling silos. By that I mean it’s very few customers who want just cloud, or just on premise, by working with NTS we can create a truly unique blend of technologies, management and financial options to build the ideal solution. It’s a big topic for us, so I would urge people to chat with us and find out how this is going to work, and what it would mean to them.
Q Big Data is another buzz topic - does NTS offer any solution(s)
around this?
A To most of our customers, Big Data isn’t something they are worried about, we have our enterprise accounts but we really operate at the top end of mid market customers, who still measure in TB’s rather than anything bigger than that. However we all know that a few years ago those same customers measured themselves in GB so we know it’s coming. At this stage we have been advising and educating when asked. My argument is why wait for Big Data? any data you have that isnt analysed is losing valuable insight into your business. At the core this is what Big Data is, control and analytics of all this structured and unstructured information. Our solution to this is focused on the consultancy element at the moment, and then working with the appropriate vendors to support each customer’s decision.
Q As a smaller reseller, how does NTS manage to compete in
the Channel?
A Smaller means faster and more agile in my view! I mean we aren’t that small compared to many resellers, we are though compared to the huge global partners. I often challenge prospective customers who have bought from the larger VAR’s, how quickly can you get a quote? How long to speak to a pre sales engineer? How quickly is it delivered?. What surprises them is that quite often we can provide detailed technical quotes back the same day, and deliver the next, AND at a lower cost. That last point really surprises them as they are used to being told the bigger the partner the lower their pricing, however due to our relationships few can beat us on most prices, and as a smaller business our overheads are far lower. So how do we compete? We prove ourselves, our customers love us and we look after them. Simple!
Q Specifically, how has NTS changed over the past few years
to reflect the massive changes in the IT world?
A If I am being honest, I don’t think we changed enough until recently, however we managed to maintain our business without a dip in profits throughout the downturn, and we still grew slightly. It goes back to my earlier comment, we built our business on delivering technically demanding projects.
That level of expertise was still in demand, other more traditional resellers found it hard as their revenue was based solely on boxes shipped. It wasn’t so much as head in the sand, but head down working hard. That’s why we are still here and many others aren’t. More recently we realised the value our customers placed on that expertise and faith in our services we offered, and have spent some time developing our range of managed services that best reflects what we do, and what we believe the market really needs.
Q Do you anticipate any more major changes in the Channel over
the coming months?
A Months? Maybe more in years, regardless of what tagline the market is running with, supply and demand has largely gone unchanged. However as a thriving reseller we are less likely to struggle for attention with the vendors, most have realised the value that it offers them. I think the biggest change will be in distribution, as they are trying to formulate cloud offerings for the channel. The question here though is where do they add value to me as a reseller? I want to create, control and be responsible for what I sell, I don’t need help with purchasing or stock, so why not work directly with the cloud vendors?
Q What type of enterprise end users form your customer base – in
terms of both size and market sectors?
A Like many businesses who have been around for as long as us, we have a varied base in terms of market. A huge portion of our revenue comes from North Sea Oil and Gas, we have some large multinationals in distribution, and a number of projects in the finance sector. As to size again hard to quantify as complexity and technical infrastructure is incredibly high for off shore installations, but user count is low.
Q How do you see this customer profile developing over time?
A We will continue to find and service all types of customers, so that particular profile will still be varied, however with the real push of our managed services that customer is easier to profile. They are private businesses ranging between 100-1000 users who need help either in support, management or provision of IT services.
Q What can we expect from NTS during 2015?
A Three main things we want to achieve this year, really grow our storage business with X-IO, gain more Cisco customers through this and our launch of NTS Flex, which I think is a game changer in partner led Cloud services.
Q Any concluding comments
A I often get asked what makes NTS different, where is our unique? Its not one thing that makes us unique, it’s how our whole business works together, no weak links and delivering that end to end solution, so many people say that, but I haven’t seen anyone prove it yet without an element of outsource.
