INTERVIEW Edmund Cartwright - Highlight
“We see the continuance of a strong trend towards the managed services model.”
Edmund Cartwright, Sales & Marketing Director, Highlight
Exciting Times for MSPs
Surrey based Managed Services Provider Highlight grew out of a consultancy business which advised customers
like the Bank of England, Inmarsat and Disney on managing data network performance. 18 years on, that company
today provides a single pane of glass cloud-based offering to MSPs as Sales & Marketing Director Edmund
Cartwright explains
COMMS BUSINESS MAGAZINE (CBM): IN A
NUTSHELL, HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE
YOUR OFFERING?
EDMUND CARTWRIGHT (EC): Highlight
monitors and measures network
and application performance in
relation to one another, delivering
value to both the Managed
Service Providers (MSP) and
their corporate customers.
Through a screen based
wallboard heat tiles represent the
real-time status of each location
or applications service and are a
combination of many monitored
elements summarised as three
key metrics: stability, load and
health.
CBM: HOW DO HEAT TILES WORK AND
WHAT OTHER NETWORK INDICATORS ARE
AVAILABLE?
EC: Firstly, the heat tile function
as traffic lights, they are intelligent
and ensure that a single
incident does not immediately
change the tile colour but instead
looks for issues which show
a persistent theme.
Additionally there are
Strip Charts enables business
decision makers with a highlevel
summary of their network
and applications to support
discussions between MSPs and
their customers at the right level.
Operations help desk staff have
additional click-throughs for the
deeper technical detail in the
form of strip charts and detail
pages. This reduces mean time
to repair (MTTR) with rapid
troubleshooting.
Alerts, which are easy to
use and set up, can trigger
immediate emails to notify all
Account Managers, Service
Managers, Operations Engineers
and corporate customer contacts
of problems with network or
application services.
These can be easily defined
as to when, how, and to whom
notifications are sent.
Alert creation is unlimited
and it’s possible to mute /
exclude alerts if required.
Watches set to maintenance
do not send alerts nor change
the colour of heat tiles. This
powerful feature enables
Managed Service Providers to go
beyond the SLA and deliver an
unrivalled customer experience.
There is of course a full
reporting service that can be
configured to meet business needs.
CBM: WITH MORE AND MORE BUSINESS
APPLICATIONS MIGRATING TO THE CLOUD
HAS RESULTED IN THEIR PERFORMANCE
COMING UNDER GREATER SCRUTINY. ARE
YOU MONITORING APPS AS WELL?
EC: Application awareness is
available via our AppVis screen
and provides the ability to
quickly identify all the applications
on the user network,
understand how vital services
are performing and monitor the
growing use of unauthorised
cloud applications.
Edmund Cartwright, Sales & Marketing Director
Highlight will also detect
all wireless access points after
a controller is configured and
will provide insight into the
performance of business-critical
applications, wherever they’re
hosted, to benefit both business
users and technical teams.
CBM: WHAT, IN YOUR OPINION, DOES 2019
HOLD FOR MSPS?
EC: We see the continuance
of a strong trend towards the
managed services model. There
are many thousands of MSPs
in the UK and they fall in to
effectively two types.
One camp is keen to
focus on differentiation and
is looking at technology to
bundle with their services. The
other continues as they have
for the last decade supplying
‘the same stuff’. They have
not radically shifted and as a
result their customers still not
getting the experience they are
looking for.
Is it a good time to be an
MSP? It’s very exciting time
to be MSP! It’s a buoyant, fast
moving and aggressive market
where the challenge is to retain
customers.
Accelerate your telecoms sales in 2019 Dealer Day
www.soscommunications.co.uk 01403 224450
28th March 2019 @ Mercedes-Benz World
Register at - Tinyurl.com/speakfontevo
26 | Comms Business Magazine | March 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
C
M
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K
March.ai 3 18/02/2019 09:20:43
/www.soscommunications.co.uk
/speakfontevo
/www.commsbusiness.co.uk