There was a time when drum riffs and door knocks rang loudly in Mark Furness' ears during the working hours. These days, the CEO of essensys is beating the drum about a sound business proposition based on big advances in user self-service and automation.
Following a stint in the music business as a professional drummer, Furness sought a career change and began to sell cable phone and TV services door-to-door on a commission only deal, a grounding that subsequently enabled him to join distributor Crane on its version of a graduate scheme. "Starting my career 'on the knock' was a great apprenticeship and taught me that sales is all about understanding your numbers," he said. "The more doors I knocked, the more I sold."
Later in his career Furness was working at an ISP in its channel team pushing the recently launched hosted voice service. "While it was a fairly new business model, it was clear that hosted services had huge potential," he said. "Any service that could be delivered, at scale with minimal engineering overhead and which provided an element of self-service would deliver huge customer benefits. I'd been looking to start a new business and in October 2006 essensys was incorporated. We started trading on 1st November that same year."
Key to the company's growth has been its relentless focus on automation and user self-service. "By using our software to automate the provision, management and monitoring of our essensysCloud platform, we are able to dedicate more time and resource to the development of our products and services," added Furness. "Simply put, we invested everything we had into our vision of self-service from day one and have never looked back."
Due to the success of its partner channels the essensysCloud is now supporting over 4,500 UK businesses across all industry sectors. "We have grown top line revenues over 330 per cent in the last 36 months, and as these revenues are underpinned by long-term contracts we can look forward to a future of strong predictable cashflow," commented Furness. "Our most notable growth story comes directly from our user interface JEFF. In the last 12 months, JEFF users have increased their monthly spend by 20 per cent with zero touch from us, enabled by our fully automated provisioning, management and monitoring of the clients' services."
The main changes and challenges within essensys over the past few years have been hinged on the issues of keeping up with the opportunities within its reach. "We're a bootstrapped business in the truest sense," added Furness. "With no VC money or private equity backing we've had to be laser focused on the right opportunities at the right times to ensure we had the cashflows to support the inevitable opportunity costs. We've got a strong balance sheet now that is allowing us to accelerate our R&D investment. To put this into perspective, 50 per cent of our employees are software developers or R&D."
To date, essensys has targeted specific verticals, most notably flexible workspace, and it has enjoyed strong organic growth on the back of this strategy. "We have a proven value and technology proposition and we will be leveraging this into new market opportunities later this year, including an exciting and disruptive UK reseller channel programme," stated Furness. "You could say we've just completed an eight year beta trial and we're now ready for a full GA release."
In simple terms, essensys' orchestration platform automates the complete essensysCloud ICT lifecycle. This includes IaaS, UCaaS, PaaS and SaaS. "We see customers increasing spend with every month without us being involved," added Furness. "They control all of their services via one interface. The key for us now is to leverage our orchestration engine and our service platforms into new markets. We currently have around 50-100 new SME leads per month that we cannot support. In the main these are end users who are moving from our serviced office customers and want to keep our services. So we need a channel to fulfil this need.
"As well as high margin, multi-product long-term revenue streams, we'll also be delivering our channel partners a steady stream of hot leads every month. As we have over 40,000 subscribers on our platform, we benefit from significant economies of scale and our commercial model delivers high margin, monthly recurring revenues to partners. The next 24 months will see us complete the roll-out of our global delivery network to launch a truly global solution. We're also looking to make a number of strategic acquisitions to accelerate our growth."
In the wider market, the trends being tracked by Furness are M2M and SDN. These are technologies that will completely change the IT landscape over the coming years, he believes. "The Internet of Things will drive operating efficiencies across so many industries that new opportunities will appear at pace," he said. "It will be a great time for agile, open and standards-based companies that can support customers' IT teams in their move from functional to strategic enablers.
"I'm also encouraged by the new breed of application and software developers that are actually delivering against customer requirements as opposed to the vendor-led products and services of old. It is refreshing that many vendors are now supporting and encouraging this via initiatives such as standards-based APIs, SDKs and application eco-systems that really allow innovation to flourish."
As well as a vibrant environment for innovation Furness has nurtured a company that encourages the proliferation of staff potential and involvement. "You could say we're like Google on a budget," added Furness. "We've got a fully stocked free bar, pool table, relaxation room with massage chairs and every Friday we have Junk Food Friday when I buy lunch for everyone. We simply all believe and are passionate about the automation of service delivery and customer self-service. This is at the heart of everything we're doing."
Another big driver in the evolution of essensys is the volume of user data that its platforms create. "As we have unparalleled user insight from this data, we are able to develop our products and services much more efficiently," noted Furness. "We're now delivering new functionality and services into the interface every four weeks. This is simply something that would not be possible without the user data to drive this development."
The challenges essensys faces today are the same for any fast growing company - people. "There's a real deficiency in the UK in terms of developer talent, so we've had to adapt our approach to ensure that we can keep up the pace of development," Furness said. "We've now got 32 full-time developers in Hanoi and although I'd much rather they be based in the UK we simply couldn't hire the quality or quantity of developers we needed here."
Furness is currently preparing for TEC'14, the firm's fourth annual conference which this year focuses on 'The Power of Orchestration'. The company will be hosting over 300 supplier, partner and customer delegates for a day of 'inspiration and celebration'. "There will be some major announcements at this year's event and we're looking forward to some great speakers too, with Lord Seb Coe as the keynote," added Furness.
"In five years time I expect essensys to be one of world's leading cloud service providers. I hope I'm still here and playing a valuable role at that point, but the one thing I know is that this company will not carry anyone or anything that is slowing it down - me included!"