Stuart Little, Director of Scotland-based Provista UK, discusses the company's bright prospects as an ambitious network-focused professional services organisation with its sights set on larger rivals and expansion south of the border.
Getting under the skin of computers at an early age piqued Little's imagination and ambition, prompting him to study for an ONC in electronics ahead of a planned career in the RAF. With flying colours Little achieved full marks in the electronics entrance exam but he was diagnosed with a hearing problem, a turn of events that led to him going back to college where he completed a HND before securing a job with Standard Telephones and Cables commissioning equipment that digitised the BT network during the early 1990s. "From there I moved to a company that installed X25 packet switched networks for some of the major banks," he commented. "I became deeply involved in data communications for the enterprise."
Then Little became a consultant engineer with Cisco Partners and achieved certification for Cisco and other vendors. With this experience under his belt Little and two co-founders set up Provista UK in 2006. Today the company operates out of offices in Hamilton, Aberdeen and Birmingham, has big plans for expansion south of the border and currently employs 30 staff. "Provista UK was initially established to deliver a cloud network monitoring and management service for Cisco IP telephony services," explained Little. "From the outset we had a rack in a colocation data centre and signed up a couple of customers, both large universities. We delivered proactive monitoring and completed all add-ons, moves and changes from a managed office and our homes for the first few months.
"We expanded with another three customers in six months and within a year we moved into our first office. Customers asked for Cisco upgrades so we signed up as a registered Cisco partner. From that point onwards Provista has grown organically year-on-year and moved through all of the partner levels and to larger offices. We are aiming to achieve Cisco Gold Partner status within the next couple of months, which is the highest partner level and would make us the only Cisco Gold partner with a HQ in Scotland."
In May last year Provista was named Cisco's Partner of the Year in Scotland for 2015, the first time this status has been awarded to a Scottish-based organisation in ten years, previous winners being the likes of British Telecom, Virgin Media and Capita IT Enterprise Services. "We are proud of this achievement as it underlines the quality of our Cisco solutions and the investment in Provista to win this award," added Little.
Provista is self-funded, debt free and has re-invested profits to drive organic growth, projecting revenues of £7 million this financial year and targeting £10 million within the next two to three years. "We are currently investing in staff, our Cisco partnership and forecasting growth, enabling us to invest more in future expansion," added Little. "We spend a lot of time recruiting and training to get the highest possible skills and this is our biggest challenge. Our strategy is to stay focused on the customer and continue providing best quality services. This can only be achieved by continuing to invest in Provista staff and developing our current employees."
Provista also has relationships with Avaya and FortiNet, to name just two, and works across all architectures - security, data centre, collaboration, wireless, as well as LAN and WAN networks along with a rich portfolio of services. According to Little the company is geared up to execute against larger rivals by leveraging its flexibility. "It is crucial for us to allow Provista to grow organically and not to lose our agility, flexibility and customer service," he added.
Provista has strengthened its security expertise, data centre and cloud offerings, and continues to build on elements of the portfolio with new products and services such as cloud video for the enterprise. "We assist our customers in leveraging all of the benefits of a secure and unified network infrastructure environment, including operational cost savings and enhanced business output," added Little.
"The industry is evolving to a services model and the suppliers that do not embrace this will struggle. There will always be a need for infrastructure but the model of delivery is changing and technologies such as SDN will become the norm. This is an opportunity for smaller more adaptable organisations such as Provista that can embrace technologies quickly and offer them to customers with a quality service wrap."•