Interview to Chris Payne, Advanced Cyber Solutions

Advanced Cyber Solutions has been an integral part of Ipswitch's presence in EMEA, which is why we took the time to sit down with Advanced Cyber Solution's Managing Director, Chris Payne. Chris started out by giving us a history lesson of Advanced Cyber Solutions' modest beginnings.

Chris starts, “So my journey in this kind of field of expertise has been going on for a little over a decade now. I used to work in networking and then found my way into IT security and have always spent my time working as a consultant. So I consider myself a hands-on kind of guy.”

“About three years ago, with two of my colleagues, we founded Advanced Cyber Solutions. And that really was the first time that I had to put on a lot of different hats in a business. Before I could just hide behind the keyboard, but, you know, now I've gotta do sales, marketing, I've gotta run the business, learn about things like corporation tax. So, you know, all the fun stuff.”

When Chris first founded Advanced Cyber Solutions, he had already had interactions in the IT security channel having worked for a distributor over in the U.K.

Advanced Cyber Solutions’s mission has been to make sure that they were incredibly customer-focused.

“On a day-to-day basis, I'll be in touch with some of our existing clients, as well as prospects. I'll be providing demos, answering questions, and of course, everything else that comes with the day-to-day administration of business,” Chris explains.

As it pertains to selling and supporting Ipswitch solutions, Chris has been working with Ipswitch Solutions through multiple employers now for about nine years.

“When we founded Advanced Cyber Solutions, it was kind of a no-brainer, really, to continue to use those skills that we've developed. I have a big love for [Ipswitch’s] solutions. I think both the MOVEit managed file transfer and the WhatsUp Gold network monitoring tools, which are the two main solution strands for Ipswitch, I think that both of them are top in their industries. It's really hard to beat them on feature set and quality.”

From the very beginning, it was a natural partnership for Ipswitch and Advanced Cyber Solutions. Chris and his team have been at it for just about three years now and have already managed to acquire customers in several different countries, which is quite impressive for a company that's still relatively small.

Chris goes on, “So we do cover the U.K. and Ireland market, we also cover Scandinavia and the Benelux region. And just by chance, we managed to pick up some customers in the U.S. as well, which is more through exploiting the relationships we had with some of their European offices. But some that come to mind are those in Scandinavia. It tends to be a fairly underrepresented region, but we do a lot of business there, and there's a real calling for Ipswitch solutions out there.”

More specifically, Chris recently sold to a customer in Scandanavia called CSAM, C-S-A-M. CSAM provides IT solutions for healthcare providers. This includes hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices. The solutions that they provide range from maternity software to ambulance scheduling and planning, to radiography-type solutions, where they can move the images around from doctor to consultant to patient.

As it happens, CSAM hosts a lot of their solutions in the cloud, and they need to make sure that these solutions are available 24/7. They also need to make sure that their solutions are always performing at optimal speed. These SLAs are the biggest reason that Advanced Cyber Solutions proposed using the network monitoring solution WhatsUp Gold by Ipswitch.

By implementing WhatsUp Gold, CSAM was able to get into some nitty-gritty metrics on the applications that they're serving up to their customers. They were able to look at things like buffer queues and the number of transactions that were taking place on the database. In addition, CSAM could put some key indicators into those measurements so that they could get warnings there was possibly too much in the buffer, or customers were having to wait too long for specific outputs on the system.

“And I'm pleased to say that, you know, they love the solution,” Chris explained. “They've got a screen up in the office showing the dashboards with various different numbers and statistics. And, you know, alarms go off and things like that. They've even talked about doing some fairly comical things with it too, like using IFTTT to change the color of the light bulbs in the office when something goes wrong.”