It’s easy to imagine that companies stacked full of information technology experts will necessarily have terrific IT themselves. Wrong. While capable of staggering acts of innovation and excellence that reward customers, many struggle in their own IT shops – just ask Charles Southey, CIO of security software firm Sophos for the last three years.
“When I came in we needed to shore up some of the operational things to scale up the infrastructure and make sure we had a platform,” says Southey, with hint of his original Zimbabwean accent remaining.
“Because it’s a technology company you have the old cobbler’s shoes problems, and some of the internal IT was not getting the attention it should have. It was running a lot on Lotus Notes and in-house developed technologies and we had a scalability challenge. I wanted to get ahead of the game because the company has grown for 20 years without a blip and now we’re accelerating for growth.”
Since taking over at Sophos, Southey has been hard at work on making changes to that effect, standardising back-office apps and integrating tools to improve automation and collaboration. In this way, Southey hopes to support growth efforts at the Abingdon, Oxfordshire-based firm that is now established among the name brands in the fiercely competitive sector of antivirus and related programs.
“Hardware standardisation was good but I needed to build in a change of philosophy,” he says of the requirement to scale up. “It’s fine when you’re small, but [having silos for areas such as] HR, sales and technical support required a maintenance overhead.”
Part of the answer has been to use Microsoft Office 2007 as the basis of desktop standardisation and collaboration, and this has had a knock-on effect in fostering other savings, for example in the area of knowledge sharing using IM.
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“Office Communicator is a big hit,” Southey says, adding that NetMeeting and Adobe Breeze are also used. “With the credit squeeze we’re taking the natural precaution of reducing the amount of travel that we did in the past. We have a large engineering team and trying to fly them around is inconvenient.”
About Sophos
Founded over 20 years ago, based in Abingdon, Oxfordshire and styling itself as an alternative to Symantec and McAfee, Sophos creates software to defend against threats such as viruses, spyware, adware, phishing and spam.
The company claims it has over 100 million end users at over 72,000 businesses in over 150 countries. For the fiscal year ending March 2008, Sophos had almost $214m in revenues, up 28 per cent on the previous year, and made a profit of almost $42m. Analyst firm IDC ranks Sophos as the largest privately-held vendor in the secure content and threat management sector.
In 2001, Sophos was named Company of the Year in the Real Business/CBI growing Business Awards.
So far, Sophos has had a good experience of audio conferencing but Southey is a little sceptical about telepresence, which requires dedicated rooms and efficient booking systems to operate at full effect.
Sophos is growing, in part through acquisitions that have resulted in the firm having a truly international presence and development centres in Columbus, Ohio and Vancouver, Canada, as well as in the UK.
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