Company details
Company: Star
Based: HQ in Gloucester, offices in London and Manchester and a data centre in Bristol
Website:
www.star.net
Clients: 4,000
Staff: 300
Who are you?
Ben White, CEO and founder of Star
What do you do?
We provide a range of internet services, telecommunications services and hosted services to small and mid sized businesses.
What does this mean in practice?
For any business today, ecommerce is playing a greater and greater role and their network is the platform on which they depend. If you think about it, was the network that important five or ten years ago? Now the network is the lifeblood.
What size business suits you?
Probably about 250-500. We don’t really deal with businesses below 50 people unless it’s a professional services company.
We should I care?
Because you can’t work without us. You can’t communicate with your customers, your suppliers or your employers. And another thing is that the internet’s great, but security is very often an afterthought. How do people know what’s really going on? Star has really pioneered providing security and management for its customers; obviously MessageLabs is an example of that.
What mistakes will you prevent me from making?
I’ll make sure that all your employees aren’t on porn sites all day. I’ll make sure that you’re safe. And I’ll make sure that you have total peace of mind that everything internet-related is secure, managed, you’ve got a service level agreement you can hold me accountable for and you’ve got a portal where you can see how I’m doing.
What can you do for me that I can’t do myself?
Nothing. You can do all of this yourself if you want to spend tens of millions.
Give me an example
Take a law firm with ten offices. Star would sell them a managed network, the platform for all of their offices to communicate with one another. All of their offices would access all of their applications – email, the web, VoIP – through that platform. Once Star’s given them that platform, all offices can access the internet from Star’s network through Star’s gateway to the internet which has security built-in. They can be completely confident that they’re in safe hands. They could try and do it themselves but even if they had the money they are just not qualified to do it; how could they be sure to make the right decisions from a security perspective or from a voice perspective? It’s taken us 13 years to get to this point and we’ve invested nearly £200m.
Why should I trust you?
You should trust us because we’ve got 4,000 customers who see us as the internet technology partner of the future, and of those 4,000 I would say 1,000 have been with us at least five years. In terms of our new business, 25% comes by way of referral, so that’s our customers telling other people about us.
What will it cost me?
It will cost less then you spend on coffee and water per person per day.