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View video of interview with Allen Timpany.
Length: 16.04 minutes. Type of file: Widows Media Video.
Hello, I'm Joaquim Menezes, Web Editor of IT World Canada. Welcome to this edition of Voices, which is being recorded in the beautiful city of Prague in The Czech Republic. I'm here covering an International Media Conference hosted by Vanco PLC, a global virtual network operator based in London England. My guest on the program is Vanco CEO, Allen Timpany, who in 1988, purchased Vanco – which was then a data services company – for the grand sum of UK £1. Vanco has undoubtedly come a long way since then and today the company has more than 200 clients across all industry verticals, managing business networks in 155 countries.
Allen in your presentation earlier today, you talked about two areas where Vanco delivers value – one: the market-facing domain in tasks such as independent selection of carriers, ongoing carrier management, and two: the service wrap around that. How important is the service component getting relative to the other deliverables?
All providers of networks need to understand that you're running a key part of the enterprise's infrastructure. We think in our business that if the network fails, within five seconds you're going to affect some sort of business process. It could be a queue of customers waiting at the door or some manufacturing process. So it's this incredibly important and time critical.
Against that background, the quality of service in the broadest sense is as important, if not more important than price. Price is obviously always going to be important. But if it starts to affect customer service, the reputation of the business or manufacturing processes, then it has a very significant cost. And even if something appeared to be cheap originally, it suddenly looks very expensive.
What we're seeing in our own experience as well as in the ICM research that we conducted is that customer – in the sense of making sure that projects are done on time, that networks are reliable and available, that there's information about performance issues and things are managed before they become a real problem to the company, are becoming even more important to enterprises as they depend upon their networks.
This morning you cited several Vanco initiatives to enhance the level of service it offers customers – and you specifically mentioned the V-Spond program. Tell us more about this program.
There are a number of specific initiatives that we have created, which we think are original on a global basis. We've put real thought into what matters to customers. One thing we do is to allow the maximum opportunity for our enterprise customers to comment on our service. So we're really open to having criticisms and positive observations as well.
So the V-Spond program is where on all calls coming in to our network management centres internationally, the customer can vote on the quality of service they've received by pressing between nought and nine on a touch tone telephone. "Zero" is poor service – five is average and above five is good service.
To put it in context, out of 10,000 calls a month coming into one of our busy network management centres, we might get 10 that are a [voted] below five in a month. So first of all we are very proud of that. Because we're making ourselves open to that sort of criticism and observation, it means the front line staff and support staff are conscious of how the come across to customers and the job they do, because they know that any moment what they're doing is going to be open to criticism.
So for those 10 or so that do have an issue – we have a service objective to phone them back within 15 minutes, and say what was you problem and how may we resolve it. That ensures then that we don't repeat the same mistake and we can deliver good service.
You also talked about application aware networking as one of Vanco's areas of focus. I understood that this is meant to ensure not just that network is working properly – but the applications that sit on top of that are also functioning effectively. Does this mean that Vanco is getting into things like supporting SAP, for example?
No it doesn't. We're definitely not in the running of IT systems or applications. What it does mean though is that as a network provider we recognize that the network is just a tool to achieve something: and that is getting data and applications to run effectively across that network.
So we will test to make sure that the performance of the original design meets the requirements to get acceptable response times for whatever applications the customer is running – SAP or Oracle or those sorts of systems. And also on a continual basis during the life time of the contract to make sure that the response times and the performance of those applications is absolutely up to the standards necessary for them to run the business.
It never ceases to amaze me, but even today there are many asset-based carriers that are providing networks, but are not bothered to help the customer to test their applications across the network, which is really the objective of the exercise; and without doing this means that [the customer] has a technical network, but not something that is useful as a business tool.
On this point of helping customers test applications across the network – you seem to be suggesting that some of the big asset-owing carriers would not do the same thing. Why? Are you saying it's just indifferent customer service on their part?
The motivation of an asset owning carrier is different, and in many cases divergent, from [that] of an enterprise customer. It's not that they're doing anything wrong; they are serving the best needs of their company. They have invested millions of pounds in assets, and the objective of the senior management is to sell as much capacity, for as long as possible at the maximum price. And that's meeting their shareholder interests.
In the case of one very large 2,000 site retail organization that was in food and beverages in the U.K. marketplace, they needed 6,000 telephone lines in these 2,000 locations. But they actually bought 7,000. So there were 1,000 circuits that weren't connected to anything at all that weren't being used for any purpose. And that was because over so many years they had added these and had forgotten about them when they moved locations, and they hadn't been cancelled. There was no audit or check from the asset-based carrier to make sure that this was actually done. That was not really in their interest. If somebody wants to buy a circuit and not use it, then why should they comment?
Whereas the Vanco approach is to sit on the side of the enterprise and to continually audit and check those things so as to drive costs down. So it's a different perspective.
Tell us about Vanco 'Active Negotiation Process' to drive costs out of the system. How does the strategy work? And what are the benefits?
Vanco views transmission infrastructure as a commodity. And while we may have a three- or a five-year contract, typically, for the provision of a managed service to an enterprise, every year we will take the transmission part - so the local loop and the backbone parts of the network – out to competitive tender to see how prices or technology