Bespoke IT solutions for Hampshire SMEs from Steve Groom and Vissensa

Four decades ago, Steve Groom, Founder & CEO at Vissensa, left school with no qualifications and became a Trainee Computer Operator for the firm that would later become Safeways. In doing so he began his long career in IT.

A lot has happened since then, but Steve is still actively involved in today’s technology sector. He runs his own managed service company, supplying public and private Cloud deployments, colocation services, business continuity and cyber security services.

Steve talked about the early days: “My formative years in IT were in technical roles in operations, and then as a system programmer – known today as system administrator – working for a number of US organisations in the software and service space, before moving from being a technician to learning sales and sales management.

“My big break was given to me when I was running a UK services company and was given the opportunity to run the US arm of the business in New York, at age 30, as their CEO. This was a massive learning curve as I can say I didn’t truly know all the things a CEO did; Like lease buildings in Manhattan!

“That role and a couple of subsequent ones, heading up a sales team for a European software vendor and running EMEA for a NASDAQ quoted print software Corp, took me travelling around the US and most of Europe and Africa, which extended to developing Southeast Asia.

“After learning a massive amount about doing business across the world and how different counties approach IT and the services around technology, I decided I was going to stop earning a salary and start a business of my own. Twenty years ago saw a gap in the software distribution model, before global distributors took the markets over, which was to take new products to existing markets or existing products to new markets.

“One of the markets both US and UK software and services companies struggled to break into was Southeast Asia, as the costs of getting people over to these markets was expensive and they needed results on an accelerated timeframe. My consulting model helped them break into these markets, co-sharing time and expertise with other organisations which were not in competition.

“It was a win-win for the companies as local distributors and agents were recruited and trained, and they got a regular face-to-face visit from the client’s “expert.”

After years of travelling the globe, solving business and technical issues, and learning how a company with global reach should operate, Steve decided to put down some IT roots in in the UK, starting in Fleet, and then opening his HQ in Minstead, close to Southampton.

“Vissensa was formed by five individuals that I had worked with in an Interim CTO role for a managed service business. I took the commercial role, and the others were all technically trained. I had a lot of experience in data centres, especially on the technical side. I had three technical implementers, with me back in a full-on sales role.

“We didn’t pay ourselves for nine months, and we started with nothing. Every piece of business we won we ploughed back into the business with the goal of having enough money to provision a rack in a quality datacentre and buy some equipment that we could stand up as a managed private cloud – way before public clouds had got going. The USP? We do things right; building quality into everything we did and being very consistent in terms of what we did – the referrals and our reputation followed.”

Steve Groom Credit: Vissensa

The company’s first rack footprint was in Equinix’s London 4 (LD4) datacentre, and Steve had to fund the first six months and the cost of the equipment personally. Within 18 months they had enough business to buy more racks and more equipment to the tune of almost £500K.

By 2015, Vissensa had clients on most continents and was supporting a number of financial services, manufacturing healthcare, legal and shipping sectors as part of our client mix. So they turned their attention locally.

“We knew that a big under supported market was smaller SMEs, within the UK and, especially, across the south. These businesses needed help in terms of understanding how to fit their IT infrastructure together, what services to adopt, and what public and private clouds could work for their business. Many had on-premise legacy equipment that suffered from being insecure, physically, and online, and was unstable from power and internet outages.

“Trying to support their end users during the pandemic exposed these weaknesses. Most of these companies didn’t realise that enterprise class equipment and services were not just for banks and FTSE 100 companies, it was available to all.

“The solution was simple; Define how SMEs could map their business to a manageable IT deployment, in terms of commercial commitment and flexibility, to grow and contract when required and make it simple to understand. Today many believe public cloud offers this in its entirety, but Steve prides himself on a company that has provided these flexible managed services from day one from his own cloud. And Vissensa strives to integrate new technology options when appropriate, “It’s in our strapline…” Steve comments, “…Forward Thinking IT.” Keeping all the technical expertise and services in-house means Vissensa has a reputation for this ability to stay ahead of the technical curve providing excellent customer support and online resources.

“A lot of IT service businesses have been eaten up by larger organisations in recent years, sometimes to the detriment of the services originally provided to their clients, as this customer service and support falls off the edge off the cliff. SME’s who have placed their trust in these support businesses are especially at risk” reflects Steve.

“Faced with a falling service, those organisations in this position look around for a strong independent service company that can take them to the next level with stability, and an opportunity to transform their business using today’s technology.

“Because we’ve consistently had our own cloud model, we’ve been able to have the discussions with organisations, big and small, as to how to get them more aligned to a cloud adoption model, which looks at where the efficient place to put their workloads might be and support their end users properly…” adds Steve, “…it’s not always a pure play public cloud only model.”

As a local company, the start may have been humble, but the rise has been bold as Vissensa rides the global tech wave through Cloud services, modern workplace, and collaborative workforce tool adoption, GDPR laws and cyber security fears here in the UK and also with data centre operations in the US and Asia.

“At the start, and we’re talking 2008, the public cloud environment was not well established; Rackspace sold lots of bare metal servers to put system on, Amazon Web Services was getting bigger, and Azure was a glint in Microsoft’s eye at that time. This was the emergence of Cloud 1.0, where everyone was rushing to the cloud, saying ‘we need to ditch on-prem, ignore Colo and move directly to Cloud, as it’s cheaper.’ In reality, neither the client or the cloud were mature enough, there was not enough service in the cloud and not enough understanding on how to control and mange services in the cloud.

“During the pandemic, we saw mass adoption of end user IT requirements and an explosion of service lead solutions deployed totally in the cloud. This explosion was during the era of Cloud 2.0, companies needed to have services in the public cloud to stay commented to clients and their workforce, but many now knew that these services were not as cheap and simple to run as first envisaged.

“In terms of cloud service maturity, we are now in the era of Cloud 3.0, which is where people much more experienced with the good and bad things about running a cloud model and are saying that completely running services in a public cloud doesn’t always work for them commercially and technically and they want to transition to a mixed way of running their IT services – a hybrid model.”

Steve puts the success they’ve had recently down to retaining focus as a business on offering a hybrid model from 2008 through Cloud 1.0, encompassing cloud 2.0, and now being in a position to offer well established Hybrid services for those embracing cloud 3.0. These client are enjoying better scales of economies, and defined SLA’s that map directly to their lines of business. Vissensa offer variations of services and tools, and their hybrid model they’ve developed over the last 16 years, means they can integrate new services smoothly into current operating models and offer a one stop managed service.

“As a business owner, you make a very considered decision in terms of the focus of your business. We, at Vissensa, decided that managed services would be the centre of our operation with our hardware sales, software licencing and consulting activities directly linked to our manged service offerings. Being a pure consulting or reseller business was not on the agenda as the focus could not be on making sure the consultants were “off the bench” and with customers or a pure margin play business.

“In our managed service world, we enjoy contract terms from between one and five years which makes for a great deal of stability in the core business. We don’t have to rely on month-by-month one off sales which makes for a business that is cash stable and can invest and grow our services to meet our client IT demands. IT changes the perspective and the aspirations of the company and the employees” says Steve

“We genuinely view our business as partnerships with our clients not transactional, and I believe our testimonials show just this,” he adds.

“Unless it has a managed service connotation to it, where the organisation wants our long-term expertise from the managed service, then actually they are probably not a business that would benefit from the Vissensa Service.”

Steve also likes to recruit from within, even when those employees may not be the perfect candidate, taking the opportunity to move them into a new role and support them to move their career forward. It’s an important KPI to the company.

As examples, Vissensa has taken apprentices through their training, into a job, and out the other side, sometimes, to do roles that we just don’t offer! During lockdown, the company employed two Kickstarters one in for Marketing and the other in the Technical department. This investment in young talent has certainly paid off.

“We now cover customers here in the south, across the UK and right across the world, from solar energy, hyper-scaling a billion-po

und businesses, to Challenger banks, shipping companies, green energy companies and a range of other sectors, right down the architect or accounting company in Southampton with as few as six people. Vissensa have a client base of over 140 clients and growing with one thing in common; they all need stable IT solutions: they need security and efficiency, and IT systems that support their lines of business and future plans.

“That’s the driving force of why I created Vissensa. I wanted to create a quality organisation, where everything we did had a quality wrapper around it. We’ve achieved that as we have great accolades and amazing referrals from our customers, even those we’ve just on boarded are already impressed.

“I never tire from the successes, it always puts a smile on my face. It just means the team at Vissensa have built, organised, and scaled the business in a way that is true to our ethics and values.

We’re very consistent in what we’re doing. It gives us an edge as an organisation if you stand us against competition; we have a different feel and edge to what we do. Many MSP did not invest in their own technology and capabilities, so their model is one of a reseller margin play much of which is publicly quoted making it difficult for them to scale and become more financially stable unless they volume sale.

“It makes them more vulnerable to acquisition – that’s one of the things we’ve seen played out across the industry with many smaller MSPO being swallowed up in a frenzy of acquisitions. We’ve steered away from this, investing our profits into the business at strategic points. We are a wholly owned, owner operated, family business supporting the local market and local jobs.”

As for the future, and our capabilities to cater for new technology that Cloud 3.0 will bring, like AI, Chat GPT and more automation , Steve feels they are prepared, with £1.5m in equipment and footprints in seven data centres across the world invested since 2008.

The expectation is that businesses wanting to return to a private cloud setup but adopt new cloud technologies such as Edge computing to get closer to their customers will look for capabilities like those Vissensa has built. Having that physical presence as well as cloud connectivity, both in the UK and internationally means Vissensa is already ahead of the curve.

“As a local business that offers a complete IT solution and support services to local companies, from licensing to backups and business continuity, security to business transformation tools. This capability allows us to be able to project these services to the business world, locally in the south, but also nationally and internationally and is something were really proud of. We’ve engineered solutions that fit any type or size of business and offer tons of free advice to businesses through our guides and blogs available on our website.

“We’ve been able to build solutions in such a way that there’s an opportunity to discuss how they can fit into any market sector. It’s really important that there are still organisations that present themselves out in the market who can provide honest independent support and services around tech, and give the right information.”

Speaking of information, if you want more information about cloud, licensing, backups, security, AI, or IT services, check out the Vissensa guides and blogs for some free resources.