Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is there much of a tradition of software entrepreneurship in Edinburgh?

Markos Symeonides: There is some. You’re probably aware that Edinburgh University has a five-star rating, along with the famous Cambridge, MIT and others. There are a lot of skills that come out of Edinburgh, but really, there are not very many global software firms based here. We do get a pick of all the talent, which is very good, so we can’t complain. We have our engineering base here in the U.K. We don’t outsource any of it. But the majority of our sales now are not in the U.K. More than half of our new sales come from North America, for example.

SM: How many people do you have in the company, and how many are in Edinburgh?

MS: We have about 250 people. In Edinburgh, I think there are probably around 80 or 90 people.

SM: And yours is one of the few software companies in Edinburgh, it sounds like.

MS: There are certainly very few with a global footprint, yes. I think we’ve got quite a lot of U.K. companies that are focused more on the U.K. We seem to have a diverse business with operations in Russia, Australia, Brazil, the Middle East, across Europe and North America. We’re quite a diverse business.

SM: Tell me what you’re seeing in your customer base, and would you talk about what are you doing in your product to address that behavior?

MS: We’ve seen a trend over the years to try and reduce the cost of support through automation and technology. The original was just a call center, then people started using email, and then they started looking for some sort of Web-based support. With this in mind, organizations are carrying on, trying to reduce that cost of support. What we’ve seen is kind of the next generation of that. It’s a rich, Web-based self-service portal that the business will access. Within that portal, they will be able to see the full catalog of services that are on offer to them from the business. Not just IT. Quite often, they will have HR services and facilities management and things in there, but predominantly IT as the backbone.

From within that portal, they’re able to log in requests and solve their own issues. Some of the things we’ve got in there are the ability for them to access the knowledge base and FAQs and also the ability for them to be able to ask the crowd, to be able to crowd source to their peers certain things, not everything, but certain things that make sense, whether they be things like how-to information for specific applications and other things. Obviously, the advantage of that is being able to reduce the cost of support. In fact, quite often there are certain things that the IT support department doesn’t really have skills and knowledge in. This concept of crowdsourcing is helping them find things faster, find those pockets of knowledge within the organization that can help people, and then also use the likes of gamification to give more badges and such for people contributing in this crowdsourcing community.

The other area we’re seeing uptake on is peer-to-peer support. The use of a rich media or instant messaging conversation between the business and the IT department. The advantage of that is as an employee or worker, you can multitask. You can be working on something and at the same time, you can be talking to the IT department about something else. And in the same respect, IT can multitask and have one agent dealing with multiple customers. The notion of peer-to-peer support and the notion of crowdsourced community support are in there as well. Within IT itself, one of the things we’ve seen out there is that they’ve kind of siloed the organization. Different departments within IT have been siloed and work within their own four walls. Quite often, organizations can struggle with getting those cross-functional teams to collaborate and share information effectively. We’ve built in something called collaboration sessions or the ability of the IT tool to launch these collaboration sessions, which effectively will have multiple people working together in this collaboration session. It’s all saved in the database.

A good example would be a major change going on with the IT infrastructure, and we want to make sure that all the different stakeholders in IT – and perhaps the business – are involved in that discussion about this change that they’re going to make so that they can do their risk analysis and assessments. All that information is then stored and saved in the database. Quite often, what happens is there are a lot of conversations that happen within IT, but they’re not stored anywhere. There are emails going out. There are people picking up the phone and having these conversations, and we’re not storing that information anywhere. By the ability to use social media within the product we’re offering, we can then manage that information and analyze it. We can use it for continuous improvement as well.

Finally, the area in which we’re seeing uptake is the mobility side of what we do and what the users expect. What we’re seeing with our customers is that due to the consumerization of IT, end users’ expectations are changing. The expectations of businesses are changing in terms of the different types of services they expect and demand. They’re expecting these I-want-it-now applications on demand. They’re expecting to be able to access information from their smartphones and tablet devices. What we were able to do is bring a product to market that allows the IT services management product to be used on smart phones. The business employees can then access IT. You remember the portal I was talking about? Well, now, people can actually [use] that from any mobile device, so using any HTML 5 application, they can access and engage and communicate and request from IT directly from their iPhones, Android phones, BlackBerrys or Windows devices.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems
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