Partner Article

Behind the business with City Lifeline

Roger Keenan, managing director of data centre City Lifeline, takes Bdaily behind the business.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

The main challenge we have faced is the slow pace of the current marketplace. The data centre we operate in central London has many clients and potential clients who implement large IT and telecoms projects. The speed at which those projects progress has dropped dramatically in recent years and sales cycle times are around three times what they were before the big crash in 2008. There is plenty of business out there, and we are well placed for many customer requirements, particularly for people who operate communications-heavy critical equipment and want it to be located in central London. We have plenty of enquiries and our sales people work hard, but clients proceed at their own speed, not ours. So the biggest challenge we face is how to get potential clients to move from “soon” to “yes” or even “no”. Sometimes the sales people even prefer “no” to yet another “soon”!

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

Gaining ISO27001 security certification was our biggest achievement of the last 12 months. It took us a year of hard work and all our physical and information security procedures and process were examined carefully, overhauled and documented. We now not only have some of the best security and protections of any central London data centre, but we have an internationally-recognised certification that assures clients that is so. We will continue to maintain and guard that status very carefully.

What is your biggest focus for the coming year?

Our biggest focus for the coming year is to continue to build market awareness of our data centre and what we have to offer. We will be launching a new website in late 2012 and investing heavily in digital marketing to enhance our current work. We have a good product, and are the second longest established colocation data centre in the country and we need to make more people aware of us. There are a lot of other things we will be doing to expand the facility, particularly in increasing and enhancing the available power capacity and we want people to know about those things.

If you had to choose one top piece of advice for someone just starting out in business, or is currently operating within your industry sector, what would it be?

The advice I give to anyone starting out in business is always the same –make managing cash flow your number one priority. You can spend as much as you like on product development, promotions to customers, increasing sales and making good profits, but at the end of it all managing cash flow is the only thing that counts. If you set your primary objective as making sure that every month more cash comes in the door than goes out of the door and you focus on that and consistently achieve it, your new business be fine.

Can you share with us your view of the current landscape of business, in this region or generally and where your organisation sits within it?

The market is in a continuous state of change, plenty of business opportunities are created but it is often frustratingly slow as customers hold back and delay projects. It is not their fault, their customers are doing the same thing and no-one will commit to new ventures or invest unless they have to. As far as we sit in our marketplace, we are in a great situation. There are very few commercial data centres in central London, but central London is where the connectivity is and where many of the customers are. We win because we can deliver a secure, reliable place for customers to host their mission-critical equipment and we can do it in a place which is local to them and with great connectivity. We are very, very well set up for the future – we just wish it would all move a bit faster!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .