Tag Archives: Operations

News

ArrowXL Appoints New Chief Operating Officer

ArrowXL, the UK’s largest and longest established 2-person home delivery specialist, has appointed Luke Barton as its new Chief Operating Officer. Luke will begin his new role and join the Exec Board effective from 1st Jan 2023.

Luke has worked for ArrowXL since 2015 in a number of management roles including Operations Support, Warehousing and HR. Most recently he has been the General Manager for Worcester and then Regional Operations Manager for the South, where he was responsible for both Worcester and Enfield Operations. In his new role he will be responsible for ensuring that the company’s operations are fully able to support the company’s continuing growth and support its strong customer base.

Charlie Shiels CEO at ArrowXL added: “Our decision to promote from within is testament to the strength of our team and our commitment to developing our people. Over the past few years Luke has proven to have an innate ability to make significant improvements at pace and drives high standards, all whilst demonstrating strong and supportive leadership and core ethical values. On behalf of the Executive Board and the Shareholders, we would like to congratulate him on this appointment – are very much looking forward to working with him on the future strategic plans for ArrowXL.”

Commenting on his appointment, Luke said: “Our industry is facing extremely challenging times and it is vital that we as a business are able to adapt and develop to ensure that we can continue to expand our portfolio and deliver a best-in-class customer experience for our clients. In my new role I am committed to delivering this and continuing to develop our exceptional colleagues to ensure we have the best people in the market.”

Appointments, News

Keysource Appoints New Head of Operational Services

Keysource, the datacentre and critical environment specialist, has appointed a new Head of Operational Services as part of a refresh that will see an increased focus on collecting and leveraging data to support the maintenance, operation and management of complex critical environments on behalf of its global clients

Jon White will take up the role bringing with him a strong IT and service delivery background having spent the past 4 years at Principal Ltd, a managed services provider, as Head of Professional Services and latterly as Service Delivery Director. He will join Operations Manager Luke Brimelow and Technical Services Manager Mark Butcher in delivering operational services and support clients with their critical environment lifecycle.

Jon Healy, Operations Director at Keysource, said: “We currently operate over 200 contracts worldwide delivering a range of bespoke solutions including our 24/7 Help Desk, remote monitoring, preventative maintenance and emergency response. Jon’s appointment will complement our existing team as we continue evolving how we deliver an exceptional customer experience and ensuring that facilities deliver maximum uptime, effectively and sustainably.”

Appointments, News, North of England, Recruitment News

Trio strengthen Rowan’s ranks as it forecasts record year

Three new arrivals have bolstered Rowan Executive Search’s ranks as the company builds on a record year.

Rowan has appointed Tammy Hopla as an associate director, Jack Bottomley as a senior consultant and Emma Milton as an executive researcher.

Their arrival follows a strong period of growth for Rowan, which achieved record revenues of £3.2m in 2021 and started 2022 with its best-ever quarter, putting the company on track for another year of stellar progress with revenues forecast to reach £4.5m.

Rowan, which has offices in Manchester and Chorley, works with business owners to secure top talent to drive their growth. It specialises in strengthening the boards and leadership teams of privately and family-owned SMEs, as well as those backed by private equity.

Tammy is a qualified accountant and has joined Rowan from Beautiful Drinks, where she was finance director for its restaurant group. She previously held senior finance roles at companies including Kiddicare, Mothercare and TUI.

At Rowan she is working with private equity houses seeking to appoint senior finance staff to their portfolio companies, as well as matching board-level finance professionals to SME owners and founders to fuel growth.

Jack has joined Rowan’s HR and operations practice, which is part of Rowan’s private capital team that is led by Louise Ellis.

He joined Wincanton as a graduate trainee in an operations role and progressed to managerial positions before moving to THG in a management capacity.

His role at Rowan sees him working with SME clients to match and appoint senior executives to drive business growth from an operational perspective.

Emma has a master’s degree in forensic psychology from Manchester Metropolitan University and has joined Rowan’s private capital team in a research role.

Paul Waite, founder and managing director of Rowan, said: “These new roles have been created to meet growing demand for our services and demonstrate our commitment to our values-based internal recruitment policy.

“We are thrilled to welcome Tammy, Jack and Emma to our expanding team and, having had our best-ever quarter at the start of this year, we continue to look to strengthen the business at all levels.

“Tammy has a wealth of commercial experience and finance industry knowledge as well as an extensive network of contacts, and her expertise should prove invaluable to our clients.

“Jack is another great example of our values-based recruitment policy. He is new to the world of executive search but has all the right qualities, enthusiasm and aptitude for the job and an impressive level of knowledge and experience of operational business functions.

“Having Emma on board with her qualification in forensic psychology is also very exciting as we look to utilise our digital analytics product Leadership Dynamics, which has been developed by our partner businesses within the LCap Group.

“Emma will be able to use her specialist knowledge and data analysis experience to deliver insights to clients using the behavioural profiling tool.”

Rowan focuses on recruiting leadership talent for SME owner-founders looking to build out their senior teams to deliver their growth ambitions.

Typical roles include chief executives, chairmen and other board level directors alongside senior executives for finance, sales and marketing, operations, HR and tech positions across sectors ranging from e-commerce, technology and life sciences to logistics and distribution, infrastructure and manufacturing.

Clients include SRL Traffic Systems, Online4Baby, Lakelovers, eCommonSense, Clubhouse Golf, SpaMedica, Music Magpie, Social Chain, MPM Products and Made Tech.

Rowan also works closely with private equity clients, including BGF, LDC, NorthEdge Capital, Pitalia Capital, Maven Capital Partners, Mercia, WestBridge and Apiary Capital.

Telecoms

Infovista launches Ativa™ for Cloud-Native Automated Assurance and Operations

Ativa suite provides 360° intelligence and operations across digital experiences, apps, services, networks and infrastructure

Includes AIOps, zero-touch configuration, active assurance, intelligent workflow automation and outcomes-based solutions

Paris, France – Thursday February 24th, 2022 – Infovista, the global leader in network lifecycle automation (NLA), today announced Infovista Ativa™, its new suite of cloud-native applications for Automated Assurance and Operations of cloudified, fixed, IP and wireless networks. The Ativa suite of applications addresses the complexity of network and service management to provide CSPs with a single source of truth for 360° visibility, interoperability and predictive automation, from the customer to the network resource and underlying infrastructure.

Ativa replaces siloed, fragmented, domain-oriented OSS and assurance systems that focus on multiple disparate domains such as subscriber, service, network, or infrastructure with a single cloud-native suite of automated operations and assurance applications. It enables a wide range of use case-based solutions – such as customer experience and device analytics, network segment performance management, IoT assurance, Smart CAPEX planning, and predictive SLA management.

Ativa includes advanced automation capabilities, including AIOps, zero-touch configuration, active assurance, and workflow automation. This enables a new generation of automated cloud-based service operations center (SOC) that equips service providers to improve quality whilst reducing costs through system consolidation, process automation and the automation of network changes.

“The complex and dynamic nature of 5G and cloudified networks makes effective network and service management impossible without 360° visibility and automation across digital experiences, apps, services, networks and infrastructure,” said Yann Le Helloco, CTO at Infovista. “By combining domain and data silos with a powerful automation engine, Ativa enables CSPs to realize agile, efficient and scalable operations, based on a single source of truth. Ativa is cloud-native by design, correlating subscriber experience, service quality and resource performance to deliver end-to-end automated assurance and network optimization through a single pane of glass.”

Infovista Ativa enables a wide range of real-time and predictive Automated Assurance capabilities to support advanced network and service operations, such as:

  • End-to-end subscriber, service and network intelligence, including geospatial customer behavior analytics and automated correlated visualization of content-specific customer experience KPIs such as mean opinion score (MOS)
  • Enterprise SLA performance visualization, including the real-time normalization and summarization of enterprise SLAs, and enterprise self-service portals supporting initial triage of issues, enabled by a cloud-native architecture providing flexible multi-tenancy capabilities
  • Cross-domain troubleshooting, from the identification of ongoing, or predicted, issues impacting customer experience to the underlying root-cause, including network resource faults, service configuration issues, network congestion and user device compatibility
  • Service and domain orchestrator interoperability, with data enrichment and recommended actions to support open- and closed-loop automation driven by open APIs
  • Automated zero-touch configuration, for network healing actions based on flexible configurable automation workflows
  • Real-time network fault analytics and prioritization, with automated and predictive correlation of events to support the identification and troubleshooting of customer-impacting events

Infovista Ativa is underpinned by an open, cloud-native platform utilizing industry standard Open APIs and software development kits (SDKs) that allow customers and partners to extend the available catalog of pre-configured Infovista solutions and build their own applications and use cases.

Pre-configured automated solutions powered by Ativa include 360° Assurance for mobile operators delivering 3G/4G/5G-NSA and 5G-SA services like SLA-backed 5G slices, overlay services, video and voice, as well as cross-domain, end-to-end geolocated troubleshooting and advanced operational analytics. Ativa also powers 360° Assurance for wireline, broadband, cable operators and roaming carriers to enable the end-to-end monitoring of traffic, performance, service quality and customer experience, from user equipment (UE) and devices to the core network, connectivity services and applications they consume.

Ativa also supports Network Lifecycle Automation solutions that interoperate with Infovista or third-party applications to enhance planning, deployment and monetization with operational intelligence.

The Infovista Ativa suite of applications can be deployed independently or in combination, and include:

  • Ativa Net™ for cross-domain visibility of network resources and infrastructure performance. It correlates network services, VNFs and infrastructure for rapid troubleshooting
  • Ativa App™ for cross-domain visibility of subscriber-facing and resource-facing services. It proactively monitors and troubleshoots QoS and enterprise SLAs across wireless and wireline
  • Ativa Experience™ for cross-domain visibility of perceived subscriber experience, including deep packet analysis
  • Ativa Automated Ops™ for automated AI/ML-driven predictive analytics; network and service orchestrator interoperability; zero-touch resource configuration; NOC/SOC workflow automation; and active testing and validation

Available in June 2022, Ativa is an all-new cloud-native assurance suite that combines new software innovations, microservices from existing Infovista software assets – including from its market-leading planning and testing product lines – and partner integrations.

For more on the Ativa suite, please visit https://www.infovista.com/products/ativa-automated-assurance-and-operations