MEET THE CONNECTIVITY TEAM

NICK HELMAN

Nick Helman
MD of Connectivity and Communications

I’ve been in IT service delivery my entire career, so I know how to deliver strong services to customers and ensure things run smoothly. When I joined Redcentric in December 2019, I brought both service delivery experience and market knowledge of the primary care sector.

I joined initially to support and accelerate the transition of up to 3000 GP surgeries from the NHS N3 network to the new Health and Social Care Network (HSCN), a programme which we were successful in delivering on time, under particularly challenging circumstances. Having joined in late 2019, just 3 months later the UK was in lockdown, while to meet our deadlines, we needed to continue with our work to provide new circuit installations to these NHS customers, to meet critical milestones and the NHS switch-off of the N3 network.

Redcentric is split into two major business units consisting of five technical towers: Cloud and Cyber Security, led by Steve O’Brien, while I oversee Connectivity, Communications, and ICT.

The Connectivity side can range from something as simple as providing a single circuit for internet access to deploying and supporting complex wide-area networks using technologies like MPLS and SD-WAN.

On the Communications side, we offer VoIP services to customers, on the Microsoft Teams or Cisco Broadworks platforms. We also offer omnichannel solutions and a whole host of value-add services such as call recording, call reporting, analytics and dashboards to enhance voice services.

Lastly, we provide ICT services which is predominantly focused on the installation and enablement of Cisco and Fortinet solutions.

Over the last five or six years, we’ve seen a shift in how customers want to consume our services. This is driven by the need to ensure every service is working together optimally, so that for example, the network performance supports the quality of service of the customer’s voice system, and the right level of security is in place across the board.

Now, instead of ordering network, telephony, and security solutions separately, more customers want all of these as a single integrated service from a single supplier who can effectively manage an end-to-end solution, address any issues for the customer and provide full accountability. For example, security is now often bundled with network services, and it forms an integral part of our SD-WAN solution for example.

At the same time, many clients are requesting co-managed solutions, and they want better visibility of their network performance and a level of control over their network devices so that they can put minor changes in place easily, while we handle more complex changes.

One of our key goals right now is to ensure that every customer can benefit from our standard service models, which allows us to deliver faster more responsive service to our customers. For some customers this does mean a level of change to their existing services, and we are working hard to smooth that transition, but it has numerous benefits for both our customers and for us. By aligning customers with standard service models, we can offer them better support and reliability, and importantly access to our full suite of services and any future enhancements. This means we can continually add value to our customers, and it enables us to deliver the best customer service possible.

We are also heavily investing in improving the customer journey through our ERP and CRM systems. We’re integrating tools like SMAX (our service management tool) and Dynamics (our enterprise resource planner) to make it easier for customers to track and manage their orders and easier for us to provide effective support. For example, we are building an API between Dynamics and telecommunication vendors that allows us to get real-time updates on circuit orders, speeding up delivery and giving customers better visibility.

Another initiative is improving our monitoring solution, WAN Insight, which gives customers more control and visibility over their networks. This is now automatically included in all new SD-WAN deployments, helping customers monitor performance in real-time and to proactively take swift action to mitigate any risks.

We’ve been working closely with a large trade kitchen supplier, who recently changed their business processes, putting more reliance on the connectivity of their remote sites. Previously, the business batch-processed orders overnight, but it has now moved to real-time order processing. This means that if a sales representative makes a sale, the CAD drawings produced for a kitchen need to be sent off to a warehouse and the accompanying order needs to be processed immediately. Having reliable local connectivity at their depots is therefore essential.

To support the customer’s new business process, we have built a series of templates within WAN Insight to give them a more granular view of their network performance. They can now monitor both fixed and cellular line utilisation in each of their 850 depots allowing them to quickly identify issues and make necessary adjustments to optimise network performance. This ensures they can maintain the real-time connectivity they need to keep their operations running smoothly.