Double Vendor Excellence gongs 'fantastic' for Redcentric says CTO Simon Michie

Computing grills the managed services firm on cloud, wireless and the growth of IoT

"We won Vendor Excellence Awards in two categories, which is fantastic," says Simon Michie, CTO of managed services provider Redcentric, reflecting on the company's success in both the Wireless Infrastructure of the Year Award and the Cloud Data Centre Provider of the Year Award categories.

"Being judged by an external, independent panel means a lot to us," he adds.

Michie is particularly proud of picking up the cloud data centre prize, as it was in recognition for Redcentric's part in an NHS project designed to "deliver better healthcare across the health service".

Harnessing its NHS N3 wide area network, Redcentre migrated tens of thousands of hospital patient records from no less than 140 UK NHS trusts to new colocated data centres in a project orchestrated by health and social care software provider System C. It achieved this within a week.

As part of the project, Redcentric is delivering two primary and two back-up fibre circuits into System C’s selected colocation data centres, as well as N3 connectivity. Each circuit has 30Mbps of layered bandwidth over which N3 will be laid.

"The public sector is a very interesting place to be right now," says Michie.

"Austerity has caused the public sector to really think about delivering services to the population in an innovative way. They have a digital agenda and a cloud agenda through government - and I think it's shown innovation where you may not expect to see it."

And innovation is something Michie is very keen on delivering in his role as CTO of Redcentric.

"My job is to imagine what the future is like and take us from A to B with our products to our clients," he says.

And so far, RedCentric's customers seem to be happy with where the company's heading.

"Eighty per cent is returning business, which is great for everybody," he says.

"We're making good money, and a nice chance to reinvest it back in the business."

Unlike many of its competitors in the managed services sector, Redcentric actually operates its own network and data centre.

"The goal is to deliver managed services that are joined up between desktop and cloud, and help customers on that A to B journey, and therefore the product we deploy and deliver is about our customers and their roadmaps," says Michie.

Michie sees huge potential for further growth in Redcentric's hybrid cloud business.

"I live and breathe cloud and have been since 2009," he says.

"But we have surveys done, and we discover the market out there is still full of people relatively early on the journey. We see customers on every point of the spectrum - from people just starting out to those who've been there for years. But our reports really illustrate that the hybrid will be the delivery model for years to come, as people continue weighing up the risks."

Michie believes that customer expectations are all about service outcomes, and that one of his firm's key roles is to help IT leaders achieve their service goals while they "think about two things at the same time".

"Keeping the lights on, but also making a transition to engage in a new world of social media, for example," he says.

"They have to challenge themselves."

As for the future, Michie believes the Internet of Things will play a growing role in Redcentric's business.

"Part of our job is to imagine the future, and see where customers are on their journey," he says. "So a big thing there is the Internet of Things. Historically, a network would just connect machines, but we're now seeing new commercial projects that integrate ‘things' into their projects. Our engineers are connecting sensors you may not expect."

Computing mentions how, with many vendors, IoT and hype still seem to come hand in hand.

"It's not just hype - it is real!" Michie declares. "You'll find it will have happened - you'll turn round one day and it will all have happened already. You can foresee that worlds really easily - and it will be delivered very, very soon."