01732 759725
Q&A
18
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potentially enormous bills for businesses.
Most of the time, this risk can be prevented
through good housekeeping, but sometimes
an IT reseller will download some wonderful
new software PBX, click the features they
want and leave doors open that they
shouldn’t have. To stop this from happening,
we hold regular training courses for partners
on voice security.
We don’t charge for these courses
and they are hands-on, rather than basic
lectures. This applies to all our training.
When we train engineers, they have phones
and computers in front of them and they
are the ones doing the programming rather
than us just telling them how to do it. That is
fundamentally different to how most vendors
do training. It’s more expensive, because you
train fewer people at a time, but we think it’s
crucial for people to have a proper hands-on
understanding of the technology.
TR
:
Presumably Spitfire’s focus on
training extends to its own staff as well.
NG:
We recruit all of our account managers
and all of our support technicians as
graduates and train them up. They do an
extraordinary amount of training, starting
with an initial three-month training course
and then continuing after that. In their first
year, our graduates do 500 hours of proper,
formal training. On top of that they shadow
more senior team members, listen to other
people’s calls, go to meetings and the rest.
We find that our competitors tend to train
people up in a couple of weeks.
Our account managers are all Cisco
certified; all have Cisco CCENT and
some have a full CCNA and studying
beyond. The whole idea is for them to
have a fundamental understanding of
data and how to route different types
of traffic depending upon requirements.
This theoretical training is combined with
extensive training on applications and the
challenges that our partners and customers
overcome – moving services into the cloud,
connecting different sites or anything IT
related. This ties in closely with our IP
Engineering solutions, such as QoS and
MPLS, which offer properly engineered
solutions and real business benefits. We
believe that our account managers are the
best trained in the industry bar none.
TR
:
Do most of your resellers have their
own engineering capability?
NG:
Most of them do, although we have
some who don’t. We even have some
partners, consultants for example, who don’t
sell but just give us referrals. There are so
many different variants. We will fit in with
whatever it is that our partner wants, rather
than forcing them to fit in with our model.
We’re finding that with the move
into managed services, IT resellers that
traditionally would have had their own
engineers, now have many fewer engineers
qualified to do things on a customer’s site.
We can fill in the gaps for them. By the
same token, if we have to do something
on-site, there are times when it might
make more sense for us to use one of
our partner’s engineers, if for example
both they and the customer are based in
Glasgow. It’s quite a flexible process.
TR
:
Does this flexibility extend to billing?
NG:
Yes, a customer can be billed by us
or by the partner. Generally, smaller IT
resellers prefer us to do it, while larger
ones prefer to do it themselves. A few years
ago, maybe 50% of our potential resellers
were saying they wanted to bill themselves.
But we’ve seen a real swing away from that
Having a local
presence
means we can
provide services
and support
those services
nationwide –
it’s because of our
IT resellers that
we are able to
do that
Spitfire’s head office
is in the Printworks in
Vauxhall, London
