4 minute read
Going for Growth
Peter Russell, Ireland Managing Director of CANCOM UK & Ireland, talks to Ambition about his ambitious growth plans for the business across the island.
CANCOM UK & Ireland’s new managing director in Ireland, Peter Russell, is well used to big challenges. He was part of the Ireland rugby team that rattled the All Blacks during a 1992 tour of New Zealand. And in business, the former fly half has held major, all-island jobs with BT, Microsoft and Neueda.
Now in his new role, which he took up in January, he has a three-year plan to significantly grow CANCOM UK&I across the island of Ireland, with a big focus on cloud transformation and cybersecurity services. And while he admits that his plans are ambitious, he says the multinational CANCOM Group is entirely behind him.
“We have presented our growth plan to Germany and they’ve fully supported us, and I’m pretty excited about it,” he points out.
CANCOM Group is a respected Munichheadquartered company that acquired high flying Novosco in 2019, creating CANCOM UK & Ireland by merging the Belfast-based managed IT services provider with two other tech companies it previously acquired in England.
The company is now working with both public and private sector customers here to provide four key digital transformation services: modern workplace, cloud and infrastructure, network and collaboration, and cybersecurity. Peter sees the latter as making up much of CANCOM UK&I’s workload in the coming months.
“After the rush by organisations to invest in and upgrade IT last year, it’s now all about fine-tuning the productivity and optimisation of those investments, including bolstering cybersecurity and transferring to the cloud. CANCOM UK and Ireland has a pivotal role in that process.”
“Security in particular is a significant growth area. COVID-19 has presented over 80% of our customers with their biggest ever IT pressure to date. Companies have everyone working from home now using laptops and various devices, all remotely enabled. Previously, this would have taken years to roll out. But it has been pushed through in a matter of months and there is definitely a need to look at potential cybersecurity risks,” he says.
“There is an ever-changing threat and cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated, so we are advising all of our customers to be extremely careful. Security is an area CANCOM UK&I is investing heavily in and last year we went through a very successful Skills Academy with the Department for the Economy, enabling us to recruit many new securityskilled staff and to set up a security operation centre in Belfast. This is now part of a much greater overall group security capability.”
Skills are a big agenda item for Peter Russell. “To grow the business, we need to ensure the team culture remains strong, and we need to look after the outstanding people we have, develop and invest in them, and strive to genuinely ensure CANCOM UK&I is a great place to work. If we do that, we will maintain our outstanding customer satisfaction levels and our Net Promoter Score, which currently sits at a best-in-class + 84.”
Peter Russell, Ireland Managing Director of CANCOM UK & Ireland
Peter recognises that locally, CANCOM UK&I is operating in a “very competitive ICT market” but a long list of prestigious new enterprise customers is testament to the firm’s continuing upward trajectory. And Peter sees many potential opportunities.
“Health is a big market opportunity for us,” Peter continues. “Cambridge University Hospitals Trust is our largest customer by far, but we work with the Belfast Trust, Northern Trust, Frimley and St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust as well as many other health customers. In total we work with around 25 trusts across the UK & Ireland. We have market-leading expertise. The service varies with each customer, but in Cambridge, CANCOM UK&I is managing the complete endto-end ICT service, including the roll out and integration of their chosen electronic patient record (EPR) system, EPIC, which coincidentally is the same EPR solution within the Northern Ireland Health Service.”
Talking about the business’s immediate tasks and challenges, he says: “We are moving more from a product business to a managed services and professional services-led business. Cloud transformation is the buzzword right now and we are moving quickly towards becoming a true tier 1 cloud transformation managed services provider.
“We are engaging with many customers who are actively moving to the cloud, some to a hybrid model with data on premise and in public cloud, with others moving directly to a fully public cloud service managed by CANCOM UK&I or our partners like Microsoft.”
Peter oversees a team of almost 300 people and is based at the company’s impressive Queen’s Road office, in the Titanic Quarter. He will soon turn his attention to engaging with staff around a new model of working as the CANCOM UK&I Belfast offices begin to fully reopen again.
“This is very likely to mean some type of hybrid model which will work for the company and also for our people. Our approach will be to listen and take things slowly, but at the same time try to encourage people to start to gradually return to the offices. When we do, I’m very much looking forward to meeting some of my colleagues faceto-face for the very first time.”
