Global expansion is beckoning fast growing Cisilion and Sales Director Nick Paul has no qualms about answering the call.
The name Cisilion draws attention to the company's heritage as a Cisco house, but there was the rub - the market had expanded and Cisilion recognised the need to provide its clients with a wider vendor offering, enabling it to be an end-to-end systems integrator. Cisilion was established 16 years ago by Roger Paul to help businesses simplify their IT deployments. The firm provides solutions to a client base in 56 countries across five continents and has big plans for global expansion.
Long-term strategic relationships with technology partners including Cisco, Microsoft, Riverbed, Dell and Oracle were bolstered in December when Cisilion built on its hybrid enterprise offering following a link-up with EMC. "This agreement allows us to work more strategically with EMC to help our customers achieve cost reductions while strengthening our own storage propositions," commented Nick Paul. "EMC's expertise lies in leveraging performance versus capacity, automating the provision of data protection and delivering infrastructure control via simplified reporting."
Cisilion expects to boost its £36 million turnover to circa £50 million this year, focusing on enterprise and commercial companies with between 500-10,000 employees. It targets senior level decision makers from all lines of business but primarily IT. "We provide transformational IT solutions spanning infrastructure, collaboration, security and the cloud," said Paul. "Our target markets include global organisations within the financial services, legal, insurance and construction sectors. Over the next five years we aim to continue our global expansion and increase revenues significantly."
Opening in Hong Kong and New York cemented Cisilion's reputation as a global partner to its clients. Another important development was moving the front office to the City of London in close proximity to clients and prospects. "In this office we launched our state of the art Innovation Centre where customers can experience first hand the latest IT technologies and solutions," said Paul. "They rely on us to understand the market and key trends, both today and what's coming in the future. One of our biggest strengths is the partnerships we have with clients. This enables us to understand their needs and in turn tailor our business to support them. We work closely with key vendors to shape our propositions; and our flexibility and level of service is what differentiates us."
The rise of the cloud continues to climb steeply and shifts towards the subscription model are well advanced. "Revenues are shifting from tin and boxes to virtualised systems and services," added Paul. "Businesses no longer want three or five-year big refreshes, therefore VARs and SIs need to adapt their offerings to deliver a much lighter, often hybrid IT infrastructure, which is less dominated by hardware choices with more focus on service and support."
This trend is redefining the role of many systems integrators and resellers who in the past have been focused on the plumbing of the network, often rooted in the provision of hardware infrastructure and licenses. "While this won't go away any time soon, in order to remain competitive SIs need to spend time building service propositions, consultancy services and user adoption practices to help their customers make the transition to cloud," added Paul.
Cisilion scooped Comms Dealer's Best Enterprise UC Solution 2015 at the Comms National Awards held last October at the Grand Connaught Rooms in London. The award recognised the merits of a large Microsoft Lync deployment at LeSoCo College where the company transformed its education system. Cisilion was also runner up for Best Enterprise Vertical Market Solution for its impressive work in the insurance sector. Rob Quickenden, Chief Strategy Officer at Cisilion, said: "Collaboration solutions are one of our strongest capabilities, and this recognition showcases the hard work we put into training our employees."
With an army of highly trained and motivated workers Cisilion is now stepping up the pace of its global growth ambitions. "To achieve our goals it's important to attract and retain the best talent in the market," added Paul. "It's the quality of our people, along with offering the most up-to-date technical solutions that will ensure we keep out-performing the market." •