In conversation with Patrick Jordan, Auxilion
Auxilion was named managed services company of the year at the 2024 Tech Excellence awards. We speak with Auxilion chief operating officer Patrick Jordan about the award and what the future holds for the company.
You won managed services company of the Year at the Tech Excellence awards – what do you think made you stand out from the other shortlisted companies?
The core of our business is that we take a partnership approach with our customers. We take the time at the beginning of any engagement to understand the customer – we discover what the North Star looks like for them and we help them get there. Our approach is not to tell customers what to do, it’s to identify and deliver what they need. Every customer is different, whether it’s a different industry or they’re at a different stage of their journey, so the North Star will be different for all of them. But it’s about identifying their unique objectives and we have a clear process for doing that.
Clearly you’re not providing a one-size-fits-all service. What’s your process for working with customers in this way?
It’s a four-pillared approach. There’s the discovery phase where we capture where the client is at, what their challenges are, and how they got there. Then we map out what the first day with us looks like, and then the first 12 months. That leads us to the onboarding phase where we come and partner with them and we work with them to define what success looks like. Finally, we bring that layer of governance and safety to the project. We have a long history in this space, and decades of expertise, so we keep our clients safe when they’re on that journey.
How does Auxilion stay ahead of its competitors, and indeed, the constant change we’re seeing in the world of tech?
The thing about digital transformation is that there is no end state. It’s constantly evolving, and that means we need to as well. For us, we’re on a journey of continuous improvement, whether that’s shift left, tooling, Artificial Intelligence (AI) – we’re looking at these areas, understanding the challenges, the solutions and seeing how we can bring value to our clients.
With AI, for example, we believe it’s the next wave of disruption, and we believe it’ll have a positive effect. Over the past 18 months, one of the areas we’ve been working on in our managed services continuous improvement programme (MSCIP) is AI. Our clients recognise the impact and potential of AI and they’re thinking of use cases. We’re working with them to realise all that potential, recognising that it has to start with governance, data, and processing. We know the use cases, but our job is to get our clients there safely. Our project management approach keeps them safe on that journey. We have the skilled people and teams to deliver on these projects, in terms of governance and when it comes to directing them on how to navigate that world.
How do your clients view Auxilion?
We get regular feedback from clients who value our partnership approach. They like that we integrate into their team in a variety of different areas, and we have the depth of expertise to do that. The thing is with Auxilion that we’re big enough to deliver, yet small enough to care. And we have that agility and flexibility that’s so important today; every plan will change, and so we need to be able to change with it. One of the greatest testaments to how we do that is that so much of our new business comes from direct customer referrals.
Is winning awards important to you as a company? What does that industry recognition do for you?
It validates the investment and the work we’ve put in over the past few years. We’re currently at the start of a new three-year strategy. We’ve put in a lot of work to identify where we grow in the next five years. We’re making significant progress: in September 2023 we announced our UK expansion, a £4 million investment in our managed services centre of excellence in Sheffield, which is part of our wider UK strategy. And earlier this year we commenced our continuous improvement programme, where we’re investing in our future. Awards like the Tech Excellence one show us that we’re doing the right thing.
Of course our customers are validating our investment and improvement programme too, with our existing customers growing all the time and a series of new customer wins. In the past 18 months we’ve had over €8 million in managed services wins. A key part of that is our people. We are a people-based business. We are intently focused on our talent, investing in them and continuously improving their skills.
In what is an incredibly competitive market, what’s your strategy for recruiting and retaining talent?
We have a keen focus on learning and development. Internally, part of our people/management plan involves promoting key talent. We have a 30% mobility ratio, which means our workforce are being promoted and they’re learning and moving upwards or laterally. We also work hard to attract new talent. We have a series of graduate programmes and we’re bringing new people through them all the time. We’re now at 500 people across Ireland and the UK (70% in Ireland, 30% in the UK). Over 100 of those joined in the last 18 months. We’re in the middle of a significant growth and investment phase and it’s all going in the right direction.
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