BUSINESS PROFILE Gardner’s field of dreams
vision that the market was moving to mobility and applications. In hindsight it was a great decision because I have had four years of fun and now I really enjoy selling to clients.”
Ty Gardner
In the four years since amicably parting company with long established telecoms reseller Universal Office Automation, Ty Gardner has found nirvana in the middle of a field in rural Hertfordshire.
B
ased in a beautiful barn conversion on the Cokenach estate near Royston, Gardner’s company, Comms-
Solve Technologies, is now leading the way in the fast expanding mobile business solutions market and has grown from a £150k turnover to £1.2 million in just four years. As a die-hard attendee of Comms Vision, Comms Dealer’s annual event for enterprise focused ICT resellers, Gardner has been evangelising about the converged business applications market for years. It was he who first demonstrated to Comms Dealer’s management team how a business executive, working anywhere in the world, could seamlessly utilise all the functions on a company’s hosted phone system, on his or her smartphone, with all calls back to the business being free of charge.
Gardner is as passionate a supporter of mobile apps and the future of BYOD business communications as he is of his lifelong football club Tottenham Hotspur and, like Harry Redknapp’s Spurs, he is laying the foundation for a bright future for the Comms-Solve team based on innovation and creativity. Sitting in Gardner’s smart and immaculately tidy office where a flat screen TV provides detailed real-time information on every call coming in and out of the building, Gardner reflected on his past, present and future in the telecoms industry. “Originally I worked in the music industry looking after heavy metal bands,” he recalled. “Then I opened and ran
two restaurants and I even sold cars when I lived in Australia for a spell.”
But it was in 1988 that Gardner first stepped on the road to a career in business technology securing a job selling copiers with London Office Systems where Terry Hunt was office manager. “I remember hearing some guys selling phones and I said I want to sell them,” noted Gardner. “You could make 20 to 30 appointments a week just by saying ‘we can make savings in your phone bill’. Terry then set up Studio Linear, an office furnishing business and I went with him. We did that for a little while then in 1989 we decided to have a go on our own. That’s when Universal was formed.
First steps “We started with the SDX 40 and then 40E, 180 through to what I think was the best ever launch in the market, the INDeX. It transformed the industry. Then we went with Avaya but later worked hard to get Mitel into the Universal portfolio because every time I walked into a customer and they had an SX2000 in there you couldn’t get it out. It took me a while as Universal was an Gold Avaya partner, but the 3300 was coming on line at that time and I am pleased to say Universal went from being an 80 per cent Avaya house to an 80 per cent Mitel house.
“I left Universal in 2008 because I couldn’t steer the ship any more and as a business I felt it wasn’t going where the industry was going. I had a
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It was essential for Gardner to get a great team of people around him who had the same vision. “I was delighted when Simon Finnerty joined me from Servassure on the technical side and Mark Hayes signed up to run our network business,” he added. “We all now concentrate on understanding what is going to make people’s lives different. Customers come into this room and they see things like the scroll boards, they see the iPads and the iPhones. Most of the time we don’t even mention a PBX. When we do a presentation these days it’s a bit like beam me up Scotty.
“We are sitting in a field in North Hertfordshire with SIP trucks coming into our office through the air with an Internet connection via a company called Skyline Networks which has never missed a beat. We have the full Mitel portfolio in the office and an array of UC applications all running on VMWare. So we are practising what we are preaching. When customers come here they can see it and play with the technology. It is not pie in the sky.”
So what of the future for Gardner and his business? “Well we know 4G and 21CN will be massive game changers,” he commented. “We know hosted is going to be here and we know that everybody is going to be running applications. Industry people going down that route today will be in the right position come 2014 and 15. If they are looking down the traditional telephone systems route they will become a thing of the past. I would tell any young entrepreneur to get into any form of applications. If you look at technology today everything is around the mobility piece. People just want to work cleverer anywhere they want. For me the saying ‘work is something you do not somewhere that you do it’ sums it all up.”
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