We recently welcomed IT expert Philip Moss to the NTTX fold, with his incredibly exciting Select IT proposition. Here we learn more about him and the system he and his colleagues have developed, while he also explains how our close relationship with Microsoft and Dell is benefitting all three organisations.

Philip cheerfully describes himself as a geek. “But I’m a user-friendly geek, I’m in the business of delivering services to users – IT systems that work for the benefit of an organisation.” He started working in IT while he was still at school: “I ended up running the school IT system, which was used by pupils and both the teaching and admin staff,” he explains. “Educational networks are always a bit of a nightmare, because they typically employ around 14 or 15 operating systems and because they always have a far greater number of users than they do computers, there are a considerable number of challenges to overcome, not normally seen in the business IT system arena!

“I guess this was what got me thinking about different ways of setting up networks, perhaps centralising them off-site, and particularly thinking about the ensuing security issues (teenage children are by far the most efficient hackers and security flaw finders). When I went into IT consultancy I was convinced I could develop a system quite easily within about six months. It took a lot of fast talking to convince my colleagues – and around three years’ hard graft.”

Concentrate on work, not your IT system
That system, developed over 12 years ago, formed the foundation of what has become NTTX Select. “This is a complete IT system; a modular platform that you pay for on a per user/per month basis. You choose which parts of the system you want, for how many people and over what term – you can switch services and programmes on and off as you need them. Select is easy to use, and is ultimately all about the user accessing the services with ease, allowing the user to concentrate on work, not on their IT system.”

Philip says one of the biggest reasons a company should choose Select is that it’s not a faceless, Internet-based Cloud provider. “When you deal with us you deal with real people – call our helpdesk and you’ll speak to a person who can solve your problem. We make a point of understanding our clients’ needs and their business aspirations so we can be an effective off-site IT department. No IT manager should look at me as a walking P45! We’re here to help him facilitate good business for his or her organisation.”

True collaboration
But perhaps the most impressive thing about Select is that it has been developed in association with two of the biggest names in the IT sector – Microsoft and Dell. Philip elaborates:

“It’s not just the case that we hold all the right accreditations and we’ve attended all the support programmes – anyone would expect that. We have a proper working relationship. We know the programme managers and the technicians personally – if we have a problem we don’t email a helpdesk, we ring the person who wrote the code.

“In return Microsoft comes to us for field intelligence. You have to realise that big corporations like Microsoft and Dell produce concepts that are delivered to the user. They don’t necessarily know what those users do with these concepts and how they adapt to the real world. Because Select delivers end-to-end solutions to real users, we’re well placed to feed back that sort of information to Microsoft. This means that ultimately we are influencing the future of these manufacturers’ work.”

Every three or four months Philip and his team head out to Microsoft’s Redmond Campus in Washington State. In one building is a giant IT lab boasting $75 million worth of hardware which is used rent-free by the likes of giant corporations and governments, as well as NTTX Select. During the intense visits, the team work with product groups and spend hours in the labs. “The point is that people go there to iron out issues of their own,” explains Philip, “but Microsoft only allows access to organisations that can then give back as much as they have taken out. While we’re solving our own problems we’re also helping refine Microsoft’s own offerings. And we are helping define the corporation’s future. I’m really proud that our relationship is so strong they are developing a dedicated lab for our team to use continuously, both when we are onsite and remotely from the UK.”

But out of sight is definitely not out of mind, with the close contact with Microsoft continuing on a daily basis. “Oh I typically spend up to four hours a day on calls or e-mail to direct contacts in Microsoft,” adds Philip. “And as much as they help us we can help them. We often find ourselves sat in the middle of product groups. As ‘outsiders with insider knowledge’ we can really push for action in a way that no corporate employee could ever do!”