IT Week: As managing director of Bailey Teswaine, the ICT arm of leading building services provider NG Bailey, how would you describe your core business?

Tony Henderson: We aim to offer businesses LAN, WAN, IP telephony, wireless and mobility as a managed service. Our 2005 acquisition of Extrasys has enabled us to deliver this via a hosted desktop service. We have been able to complement this through last year’s acquisition of s2s, a managed services provider that specialises in security, unified communications, access control, mobility, identity management and IP networking.

We also specialise in consultancy and support for infrastructure projects. We have installed some of the biggest cable infrastructures, both passive and intelligent, in the UK. Customers include some of the country’s major banks, and we recently signed a three-year structured cabling contract with BT.

This all maps onto our wider group strategy, called “For Life in Buildings”, which is geared towards delivering sustainable, intelligent building services and technologies, including automated climate control and energy monitoring. We call this intelligent facilities management (IFM).

What is the thinking behind IFM?

It’s about being able to remotely monitor and measure a customer’s requirements from a whole building perspective. We aim to provide customers with an intelligent building that has a lifecycle associated with it. With this approach, IT managers get more of a say in running buildings.

How important are environmental issues in all this?

The whole issue of sustainability is very high on our agenda, and there’s a lot of legislation being put in place around this. In terms of IFM and lifecycle management, it’s a major issue. It’s not just a matter of wanting to be an ethical business, it also makes commercial sense in that it promotes efficiency. I think sustainability is a great driver to get IFM off the ground, because there’s no other way of intelligently connecting devices at the application level so that they run efficiently, and at the end of the day efficiency equals sustainability. I think the whole issue of climate change will push the concept of intelligent buildings to the forefront of the planning process.

What kind of networks do intelligent buildings require?

It depends on the vertical industry you’re dealing with. For example, the financial institutions are future-proofing as much as they can. There’s an awful lot of fibre to the desk going in right now, but there’s some question over whether it will be needed or not, particularly with the 10 Gigabit Ethernet copper cabling systems on the market now. We are beginning to see 10GbE copper to the desktop, which is taking some of the fibre requirements away. What a lot of financial institutions are doing is going with 10GbE copper, but also putting ducts in just in case they need to pull more fibre in the future.