Confido started life as a consultancy two years ago assisting private equity firms with pre-sales due-diligence on the IT and network capabilities within medium sized enterprises. This was often followed by an invitation to fix any identified issues. The company was set up by Paul Cragg and Pete Bowers after EasyNet was sold to Interoute in 2016, and the two founders each have over 20 years of experience in the service provider industry.
Pete Bowers, CEO of Confido says, “In working directly with our consultancy customers, we could see clearly what was missing and what was needed. We spotted a big gap in the market and identified that customers needed a whole new approach to managed services. These organisations were searching for an open and honest service using real data that they could understand and on which they could make informed decisions.”
According to Pete, the service provider market often suffers from an insular viewpoint. The issue is that the products and services on offer are not ready to be consumed by medium sized enterprises; specifically, the matrix of service delivery measurements mean absolutely nothing to the non-technical decision makers in these organisations.
Pete continues, “Companies looking at digital transformation projects are faced with considerable difficulties. Most have no visibility of the applications that traverse their network, exposing the business to both operational and security threats. And when the IT is often managed by the CFO, they may have little confidence when it comes to major IT system upheavals. They are however, highly receptive to partners who can help them understand how their IT is operating today, show them what can be achieved tomorrow and deliver guidance on each small step required to take that journey.”
Paul Cragg, Chief Operating Officer, adds, “Highlight is the key to being able to have sensible and tactical conversations with our customers. We’ve been using Highlight on all our projects and it provides a clear business view of how the IT is running and most importantly, how critical applications are performing. The key benefit is that Highlight is completely independent, and it delivers a shared source of trusted information to both the customer and ourselves. With Highlight, we provide the analytics on the data to ensure customers truly understand what they are seeing and what they need to do – the priority is always to ensure staff have access to the information and tools they need to do their job.”
Edmund Cartwright, Sales and Marketing Director Highlight says, “The Highlight and Confido teams have a well-established working relationship. The Confido team is extremely professional and we can see their value in the managed service market. The current managed services market is still in need for greater transparency between Service Providers and the Corporate Customers, we’re convinced that Confido will do well with their consultative approach.”
