Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO and Co-Founder of Content Guru
"At Content Guru we place a strong emphasis on continuous innovation and improvement."
The UK IT Industry Awards are one of the most prestigious in the technology sector. The awards celebrate the role of the IT team, the centrality if IT teams to businesses and and the impact of tech teams further afield.
Owned and operated by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and Computing, the awards are the epitome of professionalism and industry knowledge.
This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Wednesday 9th November in London.
One of the finalists is Content Guru, in the running for the Cloud Innovation Provider of the Year. Computing caught up with Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO and Co-Founder of Content Guru, to find out what makes his company stand out from the crowd.
Taylor is one of the Co-Founders of Content Guru, a Bracknell-headquartered cloud communications technology provider employing 400 people around the world. Taylor's responsibilities include product innovation, market development and Content Guru's healthcare and public sector practice. A pioneer in cloud communications and real-time billing, Taylor has been active in growing his business group since setting up his first company aged 22, alongside his brother, Sean. A regular guest lecturer on strategy and entrepreneurship at King's College London, his alma mater, Taylor first started reading his father's copies of Computing in early childhood, initially believing the magazine was called 'Backbytes'.
Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers.
Martin Taylor: Content Guru enables mission-critical customer communications for hundreds of the world's largest organisations through its cloud platform, storm®. When you get in touch with an organisation's contact centre - whether a utilities provider, a retail giant, or a government agency, it is most likely that your call, chat, email or social media interaction is processed, queued, routed or handled by us.
Our storm solutions, and the offices and data centres that power it, operate across the globe - from California to Tokyo. The UK is the second largest market for contact centres and, according to McKinsey, Content Guru is the number one cloud technology provider in it. Our customers include Europe's largest passenger volume airline, some of the country's biggest banks and insurers, five of Britain's six electricity supply companies, various major retailers and 999, 111 and 101 call handling services for police, ambulance and healthcare providers.
CTG: What makes you different from other technology companies?
MT: At Content Guru we place a strong emphasis on continuous innovation and improvement. We establish weekly Kaizen goals in every department, and prioritise investment into our ongoing R&D programme. The business was founded by a group of tech-minded friends from university, and to this day almost all UK colleagues have a Russell Group degree background, with over 70% working in technical roles. We employ a mix of highly diverse, highly intelligent people with a modal age of 25 (many of whom go on to achieve senior leadership roles). Our years of experience and intense technical focus give us an edge over our competitors in the battleground that is today's customer experience market.
CTG: What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
MT: We've invested a huge amount of time and resource into improving our Customer Data Platform, which combines the benefits of data aggregation, customer journey mapping, customer relationship management and knowledge management. This enables organisations to harness their existing data and transform it into actionable insights about their business. We were delighted to celebrate our work on this innovation at the Computing Cloud Excellence Awards, where we won Cloud Data Management Solution of the Year.
CTG: What are you working on this year?
MT: Every day, human beings create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data - so much so that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years. As the power of using this data has become more apparent, we have focused on next-generation technology services that enable organisations to 'mine' this information and use it to improve business processes, employee engagement, and customer experience. Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Automation are also key themes in our R&D roadmap, as we continue to roll out this innovative technology to empower large scale organisations to deliver enhanced customer service.
CTG: Why are events like the UK IT Industry Awards important to the IT industry?
MT: The UK IT Industry Awards are a pivotal part of celebrating IT talent in the country - from the organisations that implement the technology, to the vendors who underpin it, to the people whose creativity drives the development of innovative solutions. Having been winners multiple times at the UK IT Awards, colloquially known to us as "Britain's IT Oscars", we have ourselves benefitted from being celebrated with such an esteemed award - it does wonders for a company's reputation, as well as colleague motivation and satisfaction.
The UK IT Industry Awards will take place on 9th November in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.
