11 minute read
Nimbus – A Decade Of Growth
EyeonTechnology
If working through adversity and turning it to your advantage is one sign of a true entrepreneur, then Gareth McAlister’s credentials shouldn’t be in any doubt.
Reel back ten years and Gareth left a secure job with Global Tech Giant, Fujitsu to take a step into the unknown and start his own IT consultancy business...right in the teeth of the financial crisis.
Nowadays, Nimbus is based in its own offices at Heron Wharf in the Airport Road area of Belfast, and it’s grown to become one of Northern Ireland’s leading managed IT, Cloud and Security companies with a highprofile client list including FinTrU, Linden Foods and Titanic Belfast.
Looking back on his decision to leave Fujitsu and start Nimbus Gareth recalls reactions from those around him at that time. “I can vividly remember my boss calling me into his office and telling me in no uncertain terms that I must be mad,” he smiles. “And there were times when I thought that perhaps I was!”
But he established Nimbus in humble surroundings just as recession was gripping the country, built the company up over the succeeding years and now, a decade later, he finds himself in the midst of a very different crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic.
But it’s a contrasting kind of crisis. Nimbus, in its role as a technology lifeline for its customers, has seen its turnover and its staff numbers grow during the six months of the crisis so far.
“We’ve doubled our turnover month on month compared to last year, we’ve recruited new staff and we’ve been delighted to welcome new clients” says Gareth. “We’re very confident about our growth plans for the future as a company.
“Like everyone else, we’ve had to change the way we do things. Almost overnight, we were mobilising our Business Continuity Plans and had all our staff working from home. But that wasn’t something unusual for us, we’ve always had that kind of flexibility for our people, and our team has responded brilliantly. As IT experts, if we can’t do it, there’d be something badly wrong!”
“In fact, we had everyone working effectively from home before the Prime Minister announced the national lockdown. As a result, once the lockdown was announced, we were prepared and ready to help our customers” he says. “Our clients were desperate to get remote working plans in place so our phones were non-stop for days. With Remote Working solutions being one of our core services, many were already set up for working from home but still needed assistance and advice on next steps; others were venturing into Remote Working for the first time, and our team worked hard to get many set up and working effectively in very short spaces of time.
“We quickly set up a dedicated crisis team and we set about proactively advising our customers, sorting out their concerns and providing solutions all day every day, seven days a week. At the height of the crisis, our phone calls were up by about 200% from normal levels and, from supplying 50 or 60 laptops a
month to customers, we found ourselves supplying more than 100 every day which often proved challenging given the global surge in demand for laptops at the time.
FinTrU, one of Northern Ireland’s fastest-growing companies, was quick to turn to the Nimbus team for help at the start of the Covid crisis.
“In mid-March FinTrU took the decision that all 500 employees should switch to remote working so we took swift action after a request for support on the Friday helping them achieve this over a weekend and by the Monday morning their people were working remotely, effectively and securely from home. It was a huge challenge for us, as well as for FinTrU, but one that through a good customer partnership we were able to facilitate quickly.”
The pandemic hasn’t just been about supporting clients to work from home though. Customers in key sectors, like Linden Foods, found themselves busier than ever as they worked to keep food supply chains moving. The team at Nimbus were instrumental in supporting the IT Function to ensure no downtime during this critical period and indeed were pivotal
in the smooth implementation of major change projects undertaken by the business, even during such busy times.
As customers settled into a new way of working, Gareth McAlister and his team started to work hard on streamlining systems to assist with improved productivity and security. “We started to look at how we could improve remote working for our clients by leveraging new hardware and cloud & security solutions, but also by making significant investments in cutting edge software tools to enable us to monitor, automate tasks and protect our clients IT systems 24/7, whether their people were working in the office or remotely.”
“While a lot of businesses, even in IT, found themselves furloughing staff, we found ourselves continuing to recruit. We had just had one of our busiest quarters at the start of the year but there was no time to pause, with a huge surge in demand for our services in establishing remote working and continuing to support our clients who were still working on site in key industries.
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“We’ve expanded on our areas of expertise by bringing in new staff,” says Gareth. “It’s not so easy to recruit when you can’t meet people face to face, but we’ve been able to bring in new talent very effectively and we’ve also added new clients at the same time.”
In fact, the Nimbus team was so busy over the period that it completely forgot the fact that it had notched up the ten-year milestone. “One of our clients congratulated me over the phone around our tenth anniversary, and it came as a bit of a shock to me,” Gareth smiles.
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, Nimbus continues to look ahead for new opportunities and has developed a potentially lucrative new aspect to its business over the past six months. It’s been busy working alongside one of the World’s largest tech giants, on a relatively new Dublin operation, which will see the development of a European cloud platform to rival that of Microsoft.
“In the height of lockdown we were tasked with building out and configuring all IT equipment within two Datacentres for our
client for what is set to be a major tech player in Europe. With the amount of restrictions in place we were up against a lot of obstacles but our team’s dedication meant we met the expectations of our client and we’re excited and looking forward to playing our part as the project goes on.” As the pandemic moves into the autumn and winter months, and companies start to realise that they’re in this for the long haul, Nimbus has been busy re-evaluating its strategy to cope with the demands of a changing working environment, not only for clients but also for the Nimbus team.
Security is a key aspect to the wider remote working picture. It’s one thing for an organisation to move rapidly to remote working. It’s another to make sure that they’re not making any compromises when it comes to security.
“We were already one of the market leaders when it came to cyber security and we’ve beefed up our offering over the past few months, investing close to £200,000 in state of the art toolsets that will offer our clients additional security no matter where their people are working.
“What’s more, we’re able to deploy software solutions from our own cloud platforms to wherever our clients and their people are working. That’s quite a challenge. When 200 people are working in one office building, it’s a simple matter of deploying the software to a central server. When 200 people are working at 200 different locations, it gets a bit more difficult.”
Looking past the current crisis, Gareth McAlister is clearly proud of the fact that the company he set up against the odds ten years ago and has reached its anniversary milestone.
“We’ve shown a lot of resilience and we’ve continued to thrive during economic downturns and now a global pandemic, so I think we can look forward with some confidence,” he says. “As we enter our second decade, we’re working on a brand refresh to suit the changing landscape of the business across the UK and Ireland.
“Now, more than ever, the business landscape is changing and we see ourselves actively working with existing clients and new clients to build and adapt to whatever becomes the new normal.
“We’re taking the positives out of the current climate and we see a positive growth path ahead of us.”
EyeonWomen In Business
Women In Business Membership SupportMore Important Than Ever
When your organisation has been built around membership engagement and events, the current era of Covid restrictions presents a unique set of challenges.
Roseann Kelly MBE, Chief Executive of Women In Business, acknowledges that the past six months have been challenging for everyone. However, Women in Business have adapted very well to the virtual world and are determined that the organisation won’t lose any of its focus.
“We had to be agile and flexible as soon as lockdown kicked in. Like everyone else, we moved to a new way of working,” says Roseann. “In our case, that meant pivoting our events and membership teams online.”
Right from the early days of lockdown, Women In Business was offering plenty of online contact to its members. A series of evening events hosted by Pamela Ballantine proved particularly popular, as did a series of business-focused webinars offering practical help and advice to members wrestling with Covid-related business issues.
Now, for the autumn and early winter months, the organisation has lined up a full programme of online events, ranging from round table discussions on issues like HR, finance, construction and energy through to events focused on mental wellbeing and a wide range of other issues.
Full details are available on Women In Business website – www.womeninbusinessni.com
“It’s been really important for us to stay engaged with our members, even if we can’t have them in the same room as us,” adds Roseann. “But it’s also been great for our staff to be able to be of practical help to members as well.
“The whole period has been all about resilience, leadership and effective communications. It’s been crucial to be able to give a voice to women out there, to provide them with an opportunity to talk to us and to others, many of whom are working through the same kind of problems.”
Not surprisingly, she highlights childcare as one of the major issues of the Covid crisis for WIB members. “A lot of our members found themselves balancing childcare, home schooling and work during the height of the lockdown, and it really wasn’t easy for them.
“Even as schools have returned, the childcare issues haven’t completely gone away, so it’s something that we have to continue looking closely at.”
Roseann Kelly and Women In Business also continue to fly the flag for women entrepreneurs, many of whom run small businesses which have been particularly badly hit by the pandemic.
“Quite a few are self-employed and sole traders and they’re among those who’ve been left out of the funding picture. We have a number of members who are sole traders and who’ve found themselves having to apply for universal credit just to try to make ends meet. Government assistance has been crucial, but it just hasn’t helped everyone.”
Going forward, she says, women entrepreneurs must be given more of a voice. It’s a message she’s already driving with the Department for the Economy, in an effort to make sure that its stays on the agenda.
“There is always a real danger that gender diversity could be lost in all the immediate Covid crisis reactions and that big economic decisions could be pushed through without diversity being considered. It’s something that Women In Business will continue to highlight in an effort to make sure that doesn’t happen.
“We’ve all heard the mantra that we need to ‘build back better’. Gender diversity has to be central to that wider effort and, within that, effective childcare is crucial.”
Women In Business launched a new Young Womens Network over recent months. Sponsored by Ulster Bank and available to all young women under 25, it sets out to provide an exclusive platform for young businesswomen to come together to connect, network and support each other.
The organisation has other issues to consider as we head into the autumn months and towards the end of the year. There’s the small matter of Brexit, now very much back on the radar and potentially hugely damaging to the Northern Ireland economy.
“But there’s also the tailing off of the furlough scheme, the challenges that will bring, and the fact that our businesses will have to start paying back government support loans. So, there are a lot of issues to be dealt with.
“There’s no doubt that women could be hit hard by the ending of the furlough scheme. I’ve even read predictions of a tsunami of redundancies over the horizon.
“So it’s all the more important that Women In Business is here and ready to help our members.”
