Cloudy outlook: Sentel’s Ger Connery
Sentel Managing Director Ger Connery talks to Owen McQuade about managing telecoms costs and how the telecoms software company has been a pioneer in providing cloud-based solutions for clients.
Sentel started up in Gilford, County Down, back in 1998 with three employees. Ger Connery explains that it was set up as a “unique proposition in the telecoms field” as a managed service call logging company. In the early days, it won contracts with Colt Telecom and Cable & Wireless, for providing reports on telephony activity similar to the BT network reports. However, from 1999 it also offered an online service, which was a niche at a time when few software packages were online.
“We’d actually taken two steps forward by going online, which was a scary thing at the time,” he recalls. “We approached the central government departments and they were quite scared about having their data sitting in a cloud somewhere.”
After making a presentation at the telecoms industry annual show in Brighton, Sentel built a “channel relationship” with several UK carriers and grew the business further. “Like most Northern Ireland companies of an SME nature, we’ve grown steadily and indigenously. Year on year, we’ve taken on one more staff member,” he explains. The company was still “thriving and growing” up to the recession, which has hit many businesses.
Over 90 per cent of its business takes place outside Northern Ireland and Connery asserts that it is “constantly pushing the boundaries”. The “business triangle” of London-Birmingham- Manchester is the company’s key export market and Sentel has two sales and business development staff based in England.
The export-orientated company, which has been supported by Invest NI, does also around 20 per cent of its business in the Republic of Ireland, mainly in the large corporate and public sectors. Clients have included the Department of Transport, Department of Education and Science, and the Health and Safety Authority.
Repositioning
Over the last two years, Sentel has been repositioning itself “as a direct result of the way the customer is becoming more educated” about technology. The dynamics of client P&L accounts are also changing. “ Telecoms was a considerable expenditure in the 90s but now it’s highly classified in the top five expenditures on the P&L account,” he explains. “It’s in focus more and more in recent years because technology is now driving businesses. In the old days, it was just about making phone calls. It’s a lot more than that now because you’ve unified communications that the infrastructure is built around.”
Connery points out that most major companies now have got software developers working in their IT functions. Fixed lines and calls are considerably cheaper than before but mobile telephony is far more expensive and in greater use. In the first week of January, 10 per cent of all calls received by Sentel came on the fixed line through the switchboard; almost all communication came in on the mobile or by email.
When Sentel started, call reporting was considered a “value-add” and involved a very small return on investment, but the market has changed: “We’ve educated our customers and our customers are becoming more educated, primarily through the internet. Software can be bought online cheaply from anywhere in the world and downloaded locally to your PC.”
Connery also notes that almost every graduate is now “IT-savvy”. In Sentel’s case, he remarks: “We no longer have business studies graduates coming into the business as administrators. We now have IT graduates providing tech support for our products. The whole dynamic is changing and when we go to market to recruit young IT professionals, there is quite a logjam in terms of people trying to recruit IT people.”
One end-user customer, a large dealership, employs five people on developing internal software solutions e.g. managing fleets, fuel consumption and comparing price bids for products:
“Companies are now able to build their own software products so you have to be extra special to survive in telecoms.”
Business intelligence
Sentel has focused on providing clients with business intelligence. They want to see the “full visibility” of all technology spend. The key questions for clients are: “Can you make savings, and can you assist the management team in making corporate decisions about where they’re going to spend their next £1 million or £2 million. Can you track and trace all their assets?”
This repositioning will be completed by the end of 2011. During this year, the company plans to introduce two new products. Firstly, in February, it will launch Call Manager Pro, a converged fixed and mobile management solution. The second innovation will be a telecoms expense management tool, exclusively designed for UK customer, particularly in the corporate or public sectors.
“If it’s going to be online and used, it must be easy to use and intuitive,” he comments on software. “Our history has always been making life simple for the customer, making life easy for the customer, using our products. You run the reports, we do the work.”
One advantage of operating in Northern Ireland, is the lower cost base. Local skills are also “phenomenal” with both universities and colleges producing “high level, high quality graduates” in IT. Being based in Belfast, as opposed to Gilford, also gives Sentel access to good transport systems and brings it closer to the large corporate accounts. It is sometimes faster to fly the Belfast-to- London route rather than drive from the city out to Surrey.
Sentel’s client list is impressive with a spread of large public and private sector clients across the UK. These include: Manchester County Council; the University of Liverpool; Coventry Primary Care Trust; Barclays Bank, London; Morrisons and Reg Vardy.
Managing telecoms costs
“The public sector is vital and it is being driven obviously by government to reduce costs,” he notes. “We can help to achieve some of those savings.” The market repositioning is moving Sentel from fixed and mobile commodity sales to being a global expense management player.
Connery sees four parts of a public sector organisation in the expense management process: IT; procurement; finance; and senior management.
“IT will be focused on getting control of their estate because that’s the big problem in government,” he comments.
Considerations will include: “How do I know what each branch has? How do I know what telecoms they’ve got? I need to track and trace all of that. I need to find out how many lines they’ve got, how many people are on that site, how many people are using the systems.”
Procurement wants to compare pricing against contract, benchmark against competitors and make sure the customer is being conscientious and accountable for their spend. The finance department will want to make the savings. As it monitors the actual spend against contracts, he normally considers it to be key. The management contact is usually the chief executive or managing director of a section, or the Director of Corporate Services linking back to senior management
“Everybody wants the kudos of saving money,” he says, pointing to the current ‘invest to save’ programme where an organisation can only spend the money if they can make a saving in the first year. A “massive return investment” is needed. Sentel wants to “pull all the assets together in one single portal”
Support
When organisations start down the road of proactively managing their telecoms costs they go through a learning process. Initially savings are made from monitoring expenditure. IT market research group Gartner has identified that the telecoms invoices, on average, have a 7 to 12 per cent margin error, which has also been Connery’s experience. Indeed he observes that with total communications management, savings could rise to as much as 30 per cent. Sentel’s approach has always been to support clients through this process of managing its costs and has a culture of “always supporting the customer with a locally based service.”
Profile: Ger Connery
Ger Connery is Managing Director with Sentel. A native of Tipperary, he studied at the College of Marketing & Design, Dublin, where he met his Fermanagh-born wife. After graduation they moved to London for several years and then returned to Northern Ireland where Ger was the regional manager for a large outsourcing company. He joined Sentel as sales director when it was a start-up in 1998 and became
managing director in 2005. He is married with five children and interests include sport, coaching football teams in Carryduff and family time.
