businessinfomag.uk magazine 26 Q&A By Erik Nicolai, CEO and co-founder of Workspace 365 My Life in IT What was your first job in IT? Like many people, my route into IT wasn’t the most direct. I had been working at the call centre of an insurance company, looking for something that would offer me more opportunities and develop my strengths, when I secured a position within the marketing team of a software company. The business was called X-Solutions and the focus of my role there changed quite quickly. I was marketing the product rather than the company itself, and that prompted the realisation that in most software companies the emphasis is on marketing the company and not its solutions. That distinction might seem subtle, but it’s the solutions that make the difference. From 2007, I worked in product marketing for various software companies before channelling my energies into Workspace 365. Did you get into IT by accident or design? It was by accident, although I was looking for a new position. Reading the local newspaper, a print edition – this was in 2005 – I saw a role advertised and applied. It wasn’t the software industry that appealed initially, but once I was in the job, I realised I loved it. There is magic in software. What excites you most about working in IT today? For me, it’s hyper-scalability. We can onboard a large new customer and, apart from the onboarding process itself, it really is a single push of a button. A great number of users can quickly benefit from a better way of working. Of course, that scalability isn’t easily won. Whilst many vertical scale-ups are built step-by-step, within a software company all the heavy lifting must be done upfront. As an analogy, some people build house by house, but we started by building a skyscraper. And what are the biggest frustrations and challenges? My biggest challenge comes from the balance of ambition and knowledge. Imagine that you’re a doctor. You need ambition but you also need experience. Doctors are frequently expected to discover the real issue that lies behind an initial question. Instead of jumping to conclusions, they need to be experts at joining the dots. In addition, there’s the need to balance personal and professional growth. Change is inevitable and occasionally we’ll need to reinvent ourselves. We need to be able to adopt different viewpoints and understand the challenges our colleagues face. In larger organisations, where responsibilities Erik Nicolai founded Workspace 365 in 2010 to provide people with an easier way to access all the files, folders and applications they need during their working day. By providing a personalised dashboard through which users can do everything their role requires, from communication and collaboration to project management and email, the Workspace 365 digital workspace is ideal for hybrid working. As long as they have internet connectivity, users enjoy the same experience wherever they are working and on whatever device, with the convenience of single sign-on and no need to open separate windows for tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing or email. At the end of 2022 the Netherlands-headquartered business opened a UK office in central Manchester to meet growing demand for secure, browser-based workspaces in businesses with 200-plus users and to help channel partners expand their offerings with white-label hosted or self-hosted workspaces. Here, Erik Nicolai outlines his life in IT. https://workspace365.net Erik Nicolai
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