in association with
A Sure investment
A Sure investment Written by Tom Wadlow Produced by Danielle Harris
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Channel Island telecoms provider Sure International is putting people at the heart of its innovation drive, from customers and strategic partners to its own staff and surrounding local communities
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ou could be forgiven for believing that providing cutting edge communications and technology services in remote locations presents something of a quandary. How can a business remain profitable when it is making significant investments to stay ahead of the curve in markets with limited scalability? While the global telecoms giants are reluctant to properly penetrate the likes of the Isle of Man and Channel Islands, this is exactly what Sure and Sure International has been doing for 120 years, and with notable success. The company delivers mobile, broadband, fixed line, data centre and enterprise solutions, including cloud services and igaming hosting, to more than 100,000 consumers, corporate and public sector customers, connecting islanders and island businesses to each other and
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the rest of the world. Sure also has the global might of parent Batelco to back up its local knowledge following the acquisition by the Bahrain-based company in 2013. The frenetic speed of change, combined with sparsely populated remote jurisdictions, is a fascinating and exciting enterprise that CEO Eddie Saints oversees every day. He explains: “It poses a real challenge for us alongside the speed at which technology is changing. When technology becomes obsolete you have to refresh networks, which is what we are having to do every year.” “We have had to be clever,” adds Chief Technology and Information Officer Cyrille Joffre. “Historically we have been quite innovative because we are constrained by the domestic market and its size. It’s a small volume but you can
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Building a Better Connected World Huawei, the Managed Services Partner for Sure Telecom., manages more than 150 network & IT operations in 85 countries utilising the Managed Services Unified Platform (MSUP), the award winning approach for ICT Operations
www.huawei.com/en/services
design niche, specialist products and services, and if done carefully you can generate good margin. We operate in some fairly predictable jurisdictions, and given the uncertainties created as a result of Brexit, we can foresee opportunities for international and local businesses to expand or/and redeploy assets.”
also about understanding that we’re not just a telecom operator providing voice and broadband access and basic data services. We’re beyond that. Yes, that’s a foundation of our business today but we’re very much into the advanced applications, tied into understanding and managing customers’ networks and protecting them.” Customer-led Where 10-15 years ago Sure International’s new developments in modus operandi network engineering revolves around were the catalyst four principles: for transformation, simplicity, trust, one today it is very Number of team and customer much deriving from employees at Sure driven, the latter customer demand. As International being a particular fuel of a result, Sure reviews its innovation in the company. organisational structure every “When we talk about customer two years and now has a dedicated driven it is about the partnership customer experience division. The we foster with our customers,” company also evaluates its internal says Saints. “It is about embedding processes every three months to ourselves in the customer’s business ensure continued strategic alignment. and being part of the business. We want our customers to say Transformations wow, we didn’t expect that’. Recent investments and projects “We believe the optimisation is are all geared towards fulfilling
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Eddie Saints CEO
Saints has overall responsibility for Sure’s operations in the Channel Islands and Isle of Man. He began his career with Air New Zealand before returning to his birthplace of Bermuda to take up a position with insurance giant Exxon Limited. Saints’ role included responsibility for the company’s IT and telecommunications infrastructure. He then joined Cable & Wireless and spent 25 years with the company in Bermuda before moving to the Channel Islands in 2008 as Chief Executive Officer. Following the acquisition by Batelco, Saints continues to have responsibility for managing the Channel Islands and Isle of Man businesses and drives the company’s plans for growth and development.
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a five-year transformation plan designed to bring high-speed ultraconnectivity to consumers. Sure is already providing VDSL network speeds of 40 Mbps in average and is planning to test 100-150 Mbps speeds towards the end of the year. Last year Sure International rolled out a brand new 2G-3G-4G network across its markets with its strategic partner Huawei including an IMS platform for fixed-mobile convergence and new SIP services. It also worked closely with Vodafone on joining a submarine cable asset that links the Channel Islands to France and the UK, a project named HUGO. “We call it HUGO because it’s High-capacity, Undersea Guernsey Optical-fibre, as well as a reference to the French author and poet Victor Hugo who spent 15 years in exile in Guernsey from 1855. The island provided the inspiration for many of his fine works,” Joffre explains. “We worked with a company called Xtera in submarine networking infrastructure and it was the first industry deployment of what we
call a ramen based submarine repeater. It brings a lot of resiliency and performances to our network that we didn’t have before.” This year Joffre has been working closely with Cisco to consolidate multiple networks onto one network, reducing the amount of equipment needed and again increasing resilience. Cloud is another area of focus following the acquisition of Foreshore in 2014, and Sure is working with partners to optimise managed services offerings and gauge what is best developed in-house and what should be outsourced to specialist suppliers.
These numerous upgrades and investments would be futile without robust security processes. Sure International’s data centres are ISO/ IEC 27001: 2013 certified and the company draws on the expertise of parent company Batelco, while also working with BT. In acquiring Foreshore, Sure took on a working relationship with Mimecast, an email security service which it promotes and sells across the Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Caribbean, Middle East and Indian Ocean markets. “The end game is to make sure that if we have an attack, we can detect very quickly and we can fix
It is about embedding ourselves in the customer’s business and being part of the business. We want our customers to say “wow, we didn’t expect that” – Eddie Saints, CEO w w w. i n t e r n a t i o n a l . s u re . c o m
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very quickly,” says Joffre. “We are PCI compliant and we achieved that last year. It look a lot of time, thought and energy from the team to reach that position and we need to maintain it because we need to be recertified every year. Security is something we are extremely focussed on.”
Partner network As well as leveraging the resources of global partners like BT, Cisco, Huawei, Safran and Vodafone, Sure International makes the most of suppliers with local expertise and a similar size to itself. “We work with niche vendors for different value added solutions,” Joffre adds. “Smaller companies grant us more attention and focus on our business.” Sure works with a number of vendors with presence regionally and around the world, including Comfone, Veeam Software and Mitel, respective providers of GRX/ roaming, virtual infrastructure and traditional/IP telephony solutions.
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Engagement Saints is eager to express that none of Sure’s continuing success and culture of innovation would be possible without a dedicated and engaged workforce. The company enlisted specialist consultants Invigor8 to design a bespoke employee engagement programme and carried out a number of surveys, innovation competitions and training initiatives. “Three to four times a year depending on the workload, we give our staff a challenge and the challenge can be anything that we feel would seek to get an improvement in the way operate, the way engage, the way we think, the way we provide value to customers,” Saints says. “We have used this program for the last four to five years and it’s had a remarkable impact. Staff feel engaged, they feel they’re able to make and shape the business. They contribute to the transformation that we are all seeking to achieve. We’re making sure we’re focussing on the right things and not on the wrong things.” Sure also runs an extensive
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Cyrille Joffre CTIO
Joffre joined Sure in September 2013 to head up a newly merged division incorporating planning, operations and maintenance as we focus on making some major investments in network infrastructure to deliver the next generation of high speed voice, data and video services to meet the future needs of our customers. Joffre has 18 years’ experience in the telecommunications industry and a large exposure to international and cultural challenges which has seen him work across France, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands and Singapore, most recently for Cable & Wireless Communications in Monaco. 12
wellbeing programme three to from recycling obsolete equipment. four times a year to make sure “We commit to supporting the staff continue to be happy coming communities we operate in by to work. This usually involves a supporting the vast array of charities specific question like defining who make a difference in the quality company values and making sure of life in the markets we serve,” Saints the company adheres to them. says. “We’re looking at expanding Another staff engagement initiative the principles of the Sure Community in the pipeline is an innovation Foundation to facilitate a more competition. This will involve entrepreneurial, innovation targeting 20 employees type concept. It’s almost who will attend a like Dragon’s Den. We two-day workshop want to encourage to come up with a young entrepreneurs, business case for young people a particular idea straight out of school Sure International they have developed, who have a great is located in which will be tested idea but don’t know Guernsey across six stages. where to start or have the resources to get going.” Giving back The Sure Academy also gives young Not only is Sure intent on improving people an avenue to pursue a career the lives of local communities by in technology with the company. delivering affordable and effective Launched roughly five years ago and connectivity, but also through now rolled out in Jersey, Guernsey and charitable support. The Sure the Isle of Man, the programme offers Community Foundation donates a two-year experience in engineering, anywhere between £20,000 and marketing and retail, with the aim of £30,000 a year, plus income generated fulfilling long term skills requirements.
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Saints continues: “We initially took in eight young students for a period of two years on a recurring basis each year. About 90 percent of our Academy graduates have found employment in our organisation with many of them going on to achieve qualification in network engineering and information technology.”
Future vision Continuing to enrich lives is the overriding motive and vision for Sure International in years to come, and Joffre’s five-year picture is based on a choice between being like the aviation or healthcare industry. “They are very different in embracing mistake and failures and if you look at the statistics of the number of avoidable fatalities, you can see the big dent between aviation and healthcare,” he explains. “I want us to be the aviation and not healthcare. Why? Because
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four or five years from now the telecoms infrastructure will be of critical importance for applications like healthcare and connected cars. Lives will be in our hands and we must have a plan to embrace mistakes and failures and make sure that the network is strong and 100 percent available.” Joffre finishes by describing his motto of the good, the just and the beautiful. “We help our customer to be more efficient in their operations so they can reach customers they couldn’t have reached before, so that’s the good. The just is because we have a social responsibility to connect the customers whether it is through is a 4G mobile or DSL or modem. The beautiful is about the innovation and what we can design.”
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Centenary House La Vrangue, St Peter Port Guernsey GY1 2EY +44 (0)1481 700 700 hello@sure.com www.international.sure.com