Reflections on the UKIT Awards: Content Guru's Sean Taylor

Content Guru was named Cloud Provider of the Year at the 2015 Computing/BCS UK IT Industry Awards. MD Sean Taylor reveals the story behind its success and explains what the award means for the Bracknell-based company

Caption: the Cloud Provider of the Year award was presented to Content Guru managing director Sean Taylor (centre)

What kind of business is Content Guru?

Content Guru provides multi-channel communications services from the cloud. Its storm® Communications Integration™ platform is the biggest of its kind in Europe, supporting interactions through media such as email, instant messaging, SMS, social media, video, voice and WebRTC, and integrating with hundreds of third-party software applications and hardware appliances.

Based in Bracknell in the heart of Europe's Tech Valley, Content Guru has operations across the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, the USA and Asia. The company was an early adopter of cloud, having started as a pure cloud provider a decade ago. It now supplies services to hundreds of large enterprises and thousands of SMEs in sectors such as travel and leisure, online, financial services, retail and utilities as well as local and central government.

Storm's key applications are its range of best-in-class cloud contact centre solutions, which leverage the multi-channel and powerful integration capabilities of the platform to provide next-generation customer engagement experiences.

Describe your entry to the awards; what made it unique?

The entry for Cloud Provider of the Year centred on Content Guru's storm cloud communications platform.

The cloud sector is undergoing tremendous growth and is hugely competitive, so finding a space in which to establish a best-in-class presence is highly challenging.

When it started 10 years ago, Content Guru believed that cloud could be used to dramatically improve the way in which enterprises and public-sector organisations communicated with customers and citizens. The rise of the internet and mobile services meant that customer expectations of anytime, anywhere, anyhow communication could be realised. Using storm, Content Guru aimed to move communications from a series of siloed technology offerings, such as a website, a contact centre, an SMS gateway and an email system etc, into a fully integrated communications experience.

Storm is unique in its ability to act as both a ‘communications broker' and a ‘services broker'. As a ‘communications broker' it brings together diverse channels of communications from people (e.g. email, IM, SMS, social media, voice and WebRTC) or IP-enabled devices (machine-to-machine) onto a single platform. As a ‘services broker', storm connects people and devices to information systems such as CRM and ERP systems.

No other cloud communications platform can:

• Deliver the same breadth of multi-channel services;

• Draw upon the rich data contained within other front and back office systems;

• Rapidly scale to meet the size of unexpected-demand peaks;

• Provide the security and disaster recovery options demanded by mission-critical operations on a day-to-day basis as easily and as flexibly as storm.

Storm has not only substantially improved hundreds of organisations' ability to communicate with their customers, but it has also significantly reduced their operational costs.

With its culture of flexibility and hyper-agility, the organisation is able to turn around large deployments within tight timescales, flexibly fix unpredictable customer issues, rapidly respond to unstructured demand, and quickly develop new capabilities to meet customer and market requirements. This is a vital differentiator for the organisation.

Storm also represents a triumph of UK technology, having been primarily researched and developed from Content Guru's headquarters in Bracknell.

What did you think of the judging process, especially the face-to-face judging day in Reading?

Content Guru feels that the Computing/BCS UK IT Industry Awards are the premier IT awards. This is due to a number of factors ranging from the organisations that support them, the scale of the awards ceremony and, of course, the rigour of the judging process.

Trying to encapsulate the essence of why the business is so passionate about what it does is always difficult. This was helped greatly by the face-to-face process in these awards as it gave us the opportunity to meet the judges and convey our excitement for what we do in person. It was also a good challenge as we needed to ensure that we could articulate the positive business outcomes our solutions deliver to customers within a very short timeframe.

Having two means of representing the business, firstly in writing and then in a ‘Dragons' Den' format, meant we felt that a thorough examination of our credentials had been carried out.

How did you feel when you found out you'd won?

Delighted! Hopefully photos from the evening will bear that out.

This was the perfect award to win. It rewards the hard work of the entire team, represents the fact that we have done a great job with the solutions we deliver, and also celebrates the success that our customers have helped create through their collaborative working with us.

We have a built a business out of hard work and commitment. Being constantly active and challenged to meet dynamic customer demands often leaves little time to truly reflect on our successes and the excellent work our team does for customers.

It was wonderful to get to spend an evening celebrating our achievements and to have all of that effort recognised at an event as prestigious as the UK IT Industry Awards.

It was also extremely rewarding to see the reactions from some of the younger members of the company. This victory was a team effort so it was great to have them share in the success and hopefully gain inspiration from seeing what they can achieve through hard work, creativity and dedication.

What does the win mean for your business?

While our work has been recognised in the past with a number of local and national awards, being named the Cloud Provider of the Year by the BCS and Computing magazine is our most notable and prestigious achievement.

It's been a long journey for us, having started out as pioneers in the cloud sector 10 years ago before most people knew what the cloud was. The storm platform was designed and built by our own system architects and software engineers, and we receive no external funding, growing our business purely through the re-investment of our profits. This recognition will give us an extra impetus to build our business, especially as we expand our activities into the German and US marketplaces and beyond.

Cloud Provider of the Year is more than just a technology award. It's a team award. Our success is down to the hard work and dedication of our people, without whose contributions storm and Content Guru would not exist. The win is inspiring for everyone and means a great deal to our business morale.

What did you think of the awards night itself?

It was a tremendous event and our colleagues and customers who attended were highly impressed. Stephen K Amos was an excellent presenter and created a light-hearted atmosphere, while the gospel choir provided great energy through the award presentations.

The event organisers added some lovely touches, from the glow stick jugglers upon entering the event to the dodgems and pick and mix after the ceremony.

The overall scale of the ceremony showed to everyone that these are serious awards that hold great prestige within the industry.

Obviously winning Cloud Provider of the Year made our evening extra special and was the perfect end to a wonderful night.

• This year's Computing/BCS UK IT Industry Awards will take place in November