The Business Exchange Swindon & Wiltshire August 2014 Edition | Page 18

IN PROFILE
Where did the idea come from
to set up the company?
At the time I was working for a relatively new, larger
outsourcing provider. I had been there two years and
was working with a lot of customers who were known
to me for many years previously who had followed me
there, however the balance of service versus expectation
from customers just wasn’t right. My clients were used to
attention to detail, flexibility and responsiveness, and a
larger supplier like that could just not offer it. I could see
my customers walking away from me and I had one last
chance to keep them onside – i.e. do it myself.

SIMON RANCE
Director of ISN

This month TBE interviewed
Simon Rance, Director of
Wootton Bassett based IT
business ISN to find out
more about the man behind
the company, what services
ISN offers and their exciting
growth over the last year.
What did you do before ISN?
Straight out of University I started my first job in an admin
role at local Internet Service provider (ISP) in Reading called
I-Way ltd. There, we moved quickly from servicing lots of
home users in the early days of the internet (users turning
up at our door to pay cash every month for their dial-up
connection!), to becoming a business-services ISP servicing
clients like Reading Football Club and NME Magazine.
I made a choice at I-Way to move into a Sales role,
rather than take a “Techie” path and soon moved into
a channel sales role helping resellers add Internet services
to their portfolio.
I have been pretty much doing that since with various
different organisations, but more recently have been the
integrator myself, so seeing life from the other side of the
fence has been an interesting one. The Internet is now
just a utility that everyone expects as fast and reliable
automatically, so we then get to play with the fun toys and
technology at the end of it.

When was ISN formed?
ISN was formed in 2008 and after much plotting and
planning (and panic) our first client Purchase Order happily
arrived from a client in January 2009.

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THE BUSINESS EXCHANGE 2014

An “emergency summit” was held in a beer garden
close to our office between myself and my now coDirectors at ISN, as we felt that there was a way to simplify
the approach to IT given to some fairly large customers,
but our current company was not the place to offer this.
We scribbled some notes, had a few sleepless nights, and
then made the decision to start-up ISN on our terms and
do things the way we felt were right and that customers
would ultimately appreciate.

What does ISN stand for?
As an acronym, we are Intuitive Systems and Networks
Limited (we had the isn.co.uk domain name so had to
make up something that fitted!). However, as a philosophy,
we just need to keep flexible and responsive – it is what
customers want and will happily pay a premium for if they
can get good technical work done in a way that they’re not
otherwise used to. The ISN team should be considered a
vital part of our customer’s teams and each one of them is
seen as a “trusted advisor” to our clients when looking at
what IT can bring to improve their business.

What makes ISN different?
It’s odd, we don’t feel like we’re doing things massively
differently to how I would expect a supplier to treat me.
But in working for a larger organisation for so long
and seeing how simple mistakes can affect your
relationship with a customer, we’re forever mindful
of the traps to avoid.
Not technical mistakes, but the basics. Communicating
with your customers. Good planning and honest delivery.
Engineers popping in to just chat - drink tea and eat
biscuits with customers. Nothing earth-shattering, but
when we work with our larger customers who still have
such outsourcing arrangements in place you DO realise
that this approach is seen to be “different”, which really
does still surprise me.
Amongst our customer base we look after customers
as diverse as Moto Hospitality, North Lincolnshire Council,
London Fire Service, ISS UK and Marie Curie Cancer Care.
Not because we’re the cheapest or because we’re local,
but because they trust our guys and they trust our general
approach. We’re seen as part of their team.

What are the range of services
you offer?
ISN cover all bases of IT. My background with Internet
Services means we often take a starting point of how a
customer is connected to the WWW. We then go off in a
multitude of directions, from Voice over IP, to Datacentre
and the “cloud”. We support and maintain Desktop
and Print environments, while also being able to provide
the design consultancy for large NHS or Emergency
Services projects. We’re anywhere in-between. It is nicely

diverse and our customers benefit from a broad range of
experience across sectors and technologies in both larger
and small organisations.

What is the most exciting project
you have worked on?
We had a call in January asking us to fit out the IT in a new
floating Hotel that was being commissioned in Docklands
– The Sunborn London. Again, a solution which could
have been supplied by a larger I