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| Nigel Taylor |
Nigel Taylor is Managing Director of Taylor Made Computer Solutions, an ICT reseller with refreshing views on a wide range of subjects including the connectivity applications that takes his company in to markets ‘beyond the tin’.
Established in 1994, Taylor Made Computer Solutions is a Fareham, Hampshire-based IT services and support company employing more than 100 staff. Managing Director Nigel Taylor’s philosophy is to challenge his customers on what it is they want.
“Once we have established what it is that our customers want to achieve then our task is to align their IT strategy to allow them to reach those goals. Our principal vendor partners are Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft and HP. The latter accounts for some 90% of our business.
“Many resellers in our space just don’t see or even look beyond the tin whereas Taylor Made likes to be challenged. We want to expand our skill sets and provide solutions. Take connectivity for example; we look beyond DSL towards large scale MPLS and IP VPN deployments for our customers.
“Here our partner of choice is murphx. The ‘ADSL Monster’ – all you can eat for less than £10.00 a month – has certainly put off a lot of our reseller competitors.
“Poor upload speeds that restrict wider application adoption will soon be a thing of the past as 21CN and other next generation networks roll out – murphx for example is about to launch FFTC.”
Taylor is keen to use car-based analogies to describe most things. His second tier customer applications include virtualisation, storage and hosting where he describes the differences between hosted apps and cloud-based apps as being the difference between buying a kit car and a Ford.
“It’s the difference between having a highly customisable vehicle that is exactly what you want and the compromise of an off the shelf product that approximates to what you need. Cloud-based applications today are very generic whereas providing a hosted solution for your customers requires an expert partner who can truly add value.
“Key to all these applications however is fast, reliable connectivity and here it’s good to think back to the car. Ford makes cars but they don’t actually manufacture the tyres or produce the petrol. However all three parts are required to complete your journey. It’s the same in ICT solutions; we need three elements to come together successfully. We need the power and the premises (the data centre), the connectivity and hosting (murphx) and the platform and process (Taylor Made) to deliver the solution.”
Challenges:
Taylor believes there are many challenges for both the user and the reseller. “The problem is that our world is full of complex acronyms and most resellers are only familiar with those relating to their own area of operation. For the customer however it is generally a nightmare. Our task is to make all this much simpler for them to understand – to ‘buffer’ the technology. However, first of all we have to understand it ourselves.
“I believe that the most significant way in which you can gain competitive advantage is through the effective use of technology.
“We’ve been working with murphx now for five years. It’s a relationship born out of the frustration endured working with other connectivity partners. The murphx approach was refreshing – they spoke our language rather than ISP speak. We could not talk ISP but we could interpret it and so they adapted to our level of understanding. We like the murphx product packages and the way they are advised upon – they question what you are going to use it for. This has worked to our commercial advantage many times – for example a recent large MPLS deployment. In fact we have three six figure sum MPLS deployments in place now through murphx.
“We also offer our customers data replication for business continuity and here we use the murphx data centre facility at Segensworth where we can pick from their product and services portfolio and be advised on our choices. MPLS networks represent a big opportunity for Taylor Made – five years ago they were the preserve of the corporate work but today they are more widely accessible.”
Carl Churchill, Director of murphx commented. “It’s easy to think that organisations within the ICT channel would be able to see the opportunity beyond the hardware easier than most, this is unfortunately not the case. It is universally recognised that those who focused on hardware fulfilment are coming under increasing margin pressure. The most effective way of creating long-term, lucrative opportunities that in fact cater for a customer’s requirements better than just the traditional box shifting is by building solutions, like Taylor Made have done. murphx has worked on a number of large-scale, high value managed service deployments with Taylor Made who we support with our investment into innovative connectivity, data centre environments and an internal infrastructure that offers them technical resource to architect solutions that are fit for purpose in every instance.”