Nexus in the news
An interview with Darren Scully, Commercial Director at Nexus by David Oates, Western Morning News - 11 December 2003
Three friends, all IT specialists, spent a large part of the 1990s commuting long hours from their Westcountry homes to work for companies in the South East.
The final straw came when it seemed inevitable that the Slough firm that was employing them would go out of business.
In 1998 they decided to do something to change the course of their lives and joined forces with another couple of friends working as IT contractors in the South West to form their own Exeter-based IT systems integration company, which they called Nexus, meaning a gateway.
For the five directors, all in their early 30s, it has proved to be a gateway to success and for their customers Nexus has provided access to solutions that have transformed their IT systems.
"We found that the five of us was quite a strong team," recalled Darren Scully, the company's commercial director.
"We had a finance director, two software developers, myself with commercial experience and a guy who was a systems architect."
Not only did the Nexus team solve their commuting problems by setting up in Devon, they also discovered the services they aimed to provide were sorely needed in the Westcountry and further afield.
Too often, in Mr Scully's view, IT providers supply systems that give them the most profitable deal, but are not necessarily the best technical solution for their clients.
In addition, Nexus found the leading vendors of IT equipment were not well represented in the Westcountry and were keen to offer their services via a company like Nexus.
"We operate in a partner-based role with our customers where we are the gateway to IT and translate everything for them. Most importantly, we stand as an independent adviser. We don't push any particular vendors at them.
"I am the only sales person in a company of 30 staff. When someone asks to see a member of our staff they see an engineer. A technical systems engineer will not pitch an incorrect system at a customer because he has to deliver it. We very much lead with our technical prowess," said Mr Scully.
This personalised approach has paid dividends for Nexus. In its first year of operation it started out with the modest aim of stabilising its team and providing primarily a consultancy service together with a small amount of equipment.
It set a nominal turnover target of £200,000 - it achieved sales of £1 million. Turnover is now close to £3 million.
The company has been split into two - Nexus Open Systems, which supplies the hardware and infrastructure products, and Nexus Open Software, which recently launched two software packages that are at the leading edge of information and communication technology.
One is MiCore Portal Engine, an intranet system that delivers all kinds of internal corporate information tailored to the personal needs of the user who can access it from anywhere in the world. The other is MiSupport Helpdesk Software, which sits inside the intranet.
Nexus team members were already individually accredited in their IT specialist skills as a result of their previous experience but Nexus also set out to achieve company accreditation with some of the big league IT vendors, such as Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Intel, Nortel Networks, Avaya and Cisco Systems.
In the case of Intel, Nexus achieved premier provider status, a privilege accorded to only 50 companies throughout the country.
"We found the vendors very much embraced the fact that we were setting up in the South West. We assured them that we were going to grow our business to a key size," said Mr Scully.
Within a year, Nexus had doubled staff numbers at its head office on the Pynes Hill business park.
"The people who have joined the company have been known in the industry for years, we know them professionally, they have proven track records. We have 100 per cent staff retention," pointed out Mr Scully.
"We have zero bad debt after six years of trading in the IT industry and as far as I can remember we have never lost a customer."
Nexus acts largely as a middleman obtaining from vendors the most suitable IT equipment for its clients. But the Exeter company also builds its own servers and PCs from Intel components. It claims that this often results in a less costly quote and better service. It cites a major contract with Exeter City Council (ECC) as a good example. "ECC has deployed over £200,000 worth of Intel servers," explained Mr Scully.
"We designed the server for each requirement. As you can imagine, the council environment involves everything from housing to planning. In essence ECC has probably spent £1 million with us over the past three years."
Nexus's reputation for providing large-scale integrated IT solutions has also won it some key contracts outside the South West. A major client is Berwin Leighton Paisner, a top-ten law firm based on London Bridge, employing around 1,000 staff and spending around £1.5 million on IT each year.
"Our expertise is very much in enterprise computing where it's 1,000 to 5,000 users, maybe across multiple sites and maybe across a continent or across the world," said Mr Scully.
But he maintains that Nexus provides the same high level service to its small firm clients. He is convinced that Nexus is on a winning curve.
"We have got a niche. There's nobody in our space at the moment," Mr Scully said.
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