Firm in cloud hosting bid
Entrepreneurs announce new venture after last year’s sale
TWO of the three entrepreneurs who founded and ultimately sold call centre firm City Park Technologies to Teleperformance in a multi-million deal last year have returned with a new venture.
Rod Stuart and Keith Inch, who with fellow director Gerald Murphy built CPT into a £17million turnover business with 800 staff, launched cloud solutions company GCI Scotland earlier this month.
Their latest enterprise, which delivers cloud-hosted technology solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), has been set a “modest achievable target” of turning over £6million in its first three years of operation.
GCI Scotland works in partnership with GCI Com, an independent network company which operates in a similar way to BT while focusing fully on the business sector.
The Scottish company ‘piggy backs’ on to the products and services offered by GCI, which provides clients with an ‘end to end solution from desktop to data centre’.
Asked why GCI Com had elected to work with the Scottish entrepreneurs, instead of offering cloud services directly to SMEs, Mr Stuart said: “I think GCI has seen in Keith and myself an ability to grow busi- nesses. GCI have ambitions to continue to grow significantly here.
“We feel we have got a very strong and credible business to business, sales and service model, partly developed from the contact centre industry. There is absolutely relevant experience there, and we know the Scottish market. Keith in particular has run and sold communications companies in Scotland for the last 20 years.”
GCI Scotland launched this month with 25 staff across sales and technology roles, some of whom were inherited from GCI Com. It is based at the City Park building in Glasgow’s east end.
The company’s launch comes as it cites figures from Deloitte suggesting that SMEs which embrace cloud services grow at a rate 26 per cent faster than those which do not. The research also found they are 21 per cent more profitable.
Asked to elaborate on why cloud solutions were so valuable to SMEs, Mr Stuart explained that the capital burden is significantly less because owners do not have to invest in physical hardware and systems which have a limited shelf-life.
Hardware such as physical servers takes up space and can be costly to maintain, Mr Stuart said, adding that cloud-based services offer clients ‘evergreen’ technology because it is continually updated externally and more readily ‘scaleable’ compared with buying technology ‘on premise’. It also offers “disaster recovery” benefits, for example if there is a fire on the company’s premises, as data is held externally by the cloud provider rather than in servers on site.
“But the biggest reason companies are embracing cloud solutions is the flexibility it empowers in the workplace,” Mr Stuart said. “It allows you to work from home or wherever you are with access to the same functionality that you have in the office.”
Mr Stuart, who had a senior role at TSC Technology before setting up
CPT, said the decision to establish a technology-focused business had been partly led by the fact he and Mr Inch are not permitted to re-enter the call centre sector for three years following the CPT sale.
But he said there are similarities between the call centre and cloud solutions businesses.
Mr Stuart noted: “The skillset in growing a business is exactly the same as the skillset in growing call centres. On one level, the markets are not dissimilar to call centres, where the market is dominated by a handful of big players.
“Part of City Park’s success was that we were a big small player, but we were able to be flexible, to react quickly, adapt and evolve very quickly. We were not hindered by bureaucracy you often find in bigger organisations – we were able to meet clients’ need much, much faster. That’s kind of a similar position to where we are in this cloud-hosted business.
“While there are other companies out there doing little bits of it ... kind of the only organisation out there that does the whole lot for you is BT.
“Now you have GCI, and particularly you have GCI Scotland.”
Despite his key role in building CPT into Scotland’s largest independent call centre business, Mr Stuart admits to feelings of uncertainty about starting a business from scratch again.
“You think you’d be more relaxed doing it second time round, but you’re not,” he said. You worry, you want to make sure you do it right and be a success. If you are not constantly wired into it, it is not going to be a success.”