Exporting telecoms success with Sentel
Sentel Managing Director Ger Connery and newly-appointed Chairman Noel Brady talk to Owen McQuade about how their working partnership is taking the company’s exportable service to significant new clients.
One sure sign of success for Carryduff-based telecoms software company Sentel is the rarity of its local contracts. With 80 per cent of its business taking place outside Northern Ireland, the 15-year old company has been making huge strides in the last year under Chairman Noel Brady and Managing Director Ger Connery, with both men looking forward to further growth.
As export-led growth is recognised as a key factor in growing Northern Ireland’s economy, Sentel is taking a strategic step in the right direction. Last year, Sentel’s new TEM360 product development was coming to maturity and Connery sought Brady’s advice on positioning the product for market entry, particularly in the public sector across the UK and large managed service providers.
“TEM360 is a product which is centred on organisations that spend upwards of £750,000 on their telecommunications costs per annum, so you’re really talking about public sector and large private sector organisations,” Brady explains.
Together, they set out to meet potential clients and developed a three-year marketing plan, which led on to Brady’s appointment as Chair.
“From a perception point of view,” Brady relates. “I was attracted to Sentel because they’re a young company, they’ve got an innovative product set and quite a lot of challenges to break into the market, but exciting challenges.”
The product needed to be taken to the next stage, Connery explains: “We could see that we now had an opportunity to go up the value chain and to pitch in at a higher level.”
Sentel is now dealing with partners and systems integrators such as Atos IT Services and Northgate Managed Services. The average order size, which was previously in multiples of £1,000, has now moved up to reach £15-20,000 per annum in service fees as a minimum.
As a ‘telecommunications expense management’ product, TEM360 checks the organisation’s telecoms bills against their contracts, looks for overcharging or mischarging, and also analyses the actual calls and lines that are being used and tracks the telecoms assets. Essentially, it’s ‘software as a service’ operated as a managed service. Savings tend to be found in billing items which should already have been cancelled, incorrect tariffs, and preventing inappropriate calls to high tariff numbers e.g. gambling lines or directory enquiries.
It works in two ways, Brady remarks.
“In these times of austerity, it produces savings for people who want to save on their ongoing running costs,” he firstly states. “So once you’ve identified those errors, you then get those savings for the next five years because you would have been paying it otherwise.”
Secondly, the public sector sees it as an independent auditing tool which in turn becomes a “very strong selling point.” It is not always automatically clear whether a £4 million telecoms spend represents value for money. In this case, the product provides a software service, which “checks all the bills against all the contracts and reports any mistakes.”
Likewise, a private sector Finance Director can report a refund to his or her board, after reviewing the telecoms spend.
“A couple of early big successes in the development of the pipeline brought me to the conclusion, personally, that I would like to be more formally associated with the company and I was delighted when Ger invited me to become Chairman,” Brady comments.
This is more than a figurehead role, with him getting directly involved in major sales negotiations, advising on the strategic thrust of sales strategy and how to strengthen the business internally.
Public sector clients are mainly drawn from the health and police markets, whereas the private sector customers tend to be large business process outsourcing (BPO) or managed service partners.
The overall business strategy is to raise the revenue by 100 per cent within three years, by going for a smaller number of larger and longer contracts, typically £100-150,000 each for three to seven years.
Despite the ambitious growth plans, Connery does not expect the ethos of the company to change. “In our corporate presentations, we are always saying that we’re committed to managed service, and we have been for 15 years. That hasn’t changed,” he comments. “What Noel has done is structured it better so we’re more efficient in the way that we handle our clients.”
High standards
With larger clients, the demands and standards have become higher. The structures of the teams have been re-organised with Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes being rolled out across the business. The public sector, for example, is looking for ITIL-based helpdesks and the standard is accepted as a wide-ranging indicator of best practice, covering software development and complaints processes.
Asked to point out how this has worked in practice, they highlight a large health organisation, where the early implementation work uncovered a significant number of unused telephone lines. Closing these down provided immediate substantial savings. These type of issues tend to occur when organisations merge or go through large transformations, but closure notices are either forgotten or overlooked for lines and services to be cancelled.
Separately, in a major utility, Sentel found that calls were being made from the same extension to the same number at vastly different rates at the same time of day. The US-based consultancy Gartner suggests that 7-12 per cent of bills in the European market are inaccurate, a potential loss of £70-120,000 when £1 million spend is involved.
The software usually pays for itself within the first year and managers can also go back five years for a refund. Public sector clients are increasingly using the ‘infrastructure cost reduction’ model. For example, the proposition that an organisation saves £100,000 and asks for a £400,000 investment to cover a project is much more attractive than asking for the full £500,000 upfront.
Sentel has always been an export-driven company and its plan is very much growth-focused.
“I think that will continue because the service model is internet-based and easy to export, plus you retain the hub back at home and you keep the costs down,” Connery relates. “It’s cloud-based and with the webinar-type training model, you don’t physically have to ‘go to site’ except for the selling initially and the project meetings.”
He explains that it’s also an efficient model for managing business growth: “You get exponential growth per job investment. It’s very scalable.” For an SME, every extra job carries a major cost, which must be covered by a large amount of sales.
Success stories have included working with Wolseley, a large plumbing and heating merchant, and Genworth (previously GE Capital) in a three-year deal on the billing validation module.
Skills gap
Brady names managing resources as the biggest challenge for Northern Ireland’s ICT sector. “As we grow here, we will need more specialist ICT resources for managing and delivering that growth,” he says. “We’ve just got to keep our eye on that so we don’t go too fast in sales and then we don’t have the people to implement it. This could damage our reputation.”
However, Connery notes that recruiting staff with the right skills level is “very, very difficult.” He continues: “There are lots of software developers out there but it’s a matter of getting the right ones who will work in our model of business.” Developers need to regularly interface with customers.
Sentel has recently conducted an analysis of its training needs, with a view to re-positioning the existing staff and developing their careers. At least two new employees are expected to be recruited in the near future.
As well as the UK market, the firm has made “a few forays” into the Republic, Connery emphasises. In a joint venture deal with Eircom, it completed a major billing project for Galway University. Sentel is also working with Eircom to put First Trust and AIB UK on to the one solution, and a partnership with Damovo, formerly Ericsson, has opened up the managed service market, bringing public sector access.
Interestingly, Sentel is getting some traction into the telecoms companies themselves. “Some of them are starting to realise that this is a tool that they could actually use as a benchmarking tool against their competitors,” Brady remarks.
“Yes, there is an element of it which looks for overspend but there’s all the other facilities that it provides which could also help them manage the clients’ network estate and provide mobile and fixed management services.”
Connery sees TEM360 as bringing a customer’s telecoms operations “all under the centralised portal” by placing a value on each mobile, laptop and PC owned by the company and scheduling its due date.
“You’d be surprised how many organisations don’t have that information to hand,” he comments. While some companies have been adopting a ‘bring your own device’ (BOYD) e.g. giving an employee an allowance to use their own device, monitoring is now even more important.
In essence, good telecoms management is good governance. “We would say: ‘You must track the assets,’” Connery states. “Once an employee is using your network, you’ve a company responsibility of governance. If you’re on that network, we need to know how it’s used.”
| Ger on Noel | Noel on Ger |
| Ger first met Noel, a “larger than life character,” when he was working for CFM, in the early 90s. “I walk long distances in London, Noel doesn’t,” he comments. He appreciates Brady’s ultimate experience in every walk of life, including the business world and working for charity: “Bringing all that to our table has been brilliant, even bringing the young guns on. Having the sounding board of an experienced advisor is very important to me.” | Noel finds Ger a “very responsive person to work with” who “debates ideas but implements the ideas very quickly” rather than paying lip service. “I think he has given younger people a really good opportunity to grow within the company,” he adds. The two of them get on well together and work hard, and Noel hopes that his insight will be helpful for his colleague. He also hopes that Ger will soon learn how to use taxis to go places in London. |
| Profile: Noel Brady | Profile: Ger Connery |
| Noel started off as a Civil Service clerk in Belfast, aged 17 in 1975. From 1991, he worked as CFM Group’s Director of Business Development and then Client Services Director. In 1998, he became Sales and Marketing Director for the SX3 start-up and was promoted to Managing Director in 2002. He has headed up his NB1 consultancy since 2004. | A native of Tipperary, Ger studied at the College of Marketing & Design, Dublin. From 1988, he worked for Moore Paragon in sales in London and later in Belfast as Regional Sales Manager. He then joined Sentel as Sales Director when it was a start-up in 1998 and became Managing Director in 2005. Married with five children, his interests include sport, coaching football teams in Carryduff and family time. |
