You’ve not heard much from me on this blog. I’ve been kept pretty occupied these past few years running the customer service and support side of the SynApps Solutions business.

There have been some pretty profound back stage changes in the past few months that have required everyone’s attention here. Those changes are what I want to briefly talk about today, as I think they are both interesting but also important to understand in terms of the direction of travel we’re taking.

In July we announced that we’re re-organising the management part of the company in the wake of Jim’s decision to retire at the end of the year : myself and Mark Winstone are combining forces to become joint CEOs of the company.

Small to medium, in one smooth jump

Now, there are various reasons behind this move, and Mark will have told you more about that in our last blog. But I think it is useful to know that bringing his perspective as the sales and marketing manager and mine as the customer services manager together is about bringing two sides of the company together – so that they are working in unison.

That’s one facet of a whole slew of changes that one can sum up as saying, We’re changing from being a small company to a medium sized company. So when I mention back stage changes, what’s been happening there is an important part of our metamorphosis – another way we are preparing ourselves for a new phase in our growth.

The past twelve months or so have been dominated by us committing to a more formal, standardised way of doing business. It’s also been about putting in place structures to focus on better quality and superior customer service. I refer to our move to becoming an ISO 27001 information security certified company.

ISO 27001 is the gold standard for working properly and reliably with data. We want all our customers, in the NHS, in the Police, in the commercial sector, to know that we are a guaranteed safe pair of hands.

Getting that certification requires a lot of hard work, which the SynApps team were willing to get done. As a result, our policies and procedures are enterprise-class and very robust and your data and information are now incredibly secure with us.

Becoming the company you need us to be

We’re not done with standards. Our next push is in the operational quality field, with ISO9001 – part of a concerted SynApps drive to become an accredited professional company to partner and do business with.

At the same time, we’ve been doing a lot internally around building our cloud capability. That’s a side of the business that has seen real growth, reflecting the way buyers’ residual concerns about security and control have been receding. Cloud is another core focus for us as we take SynApps to the next stage.

Putting Mark and I together in the driving seat of these changes makes lots of sense; we need to work together to become the company we want to be – and which you, our customers, need us to be.

Thank you for your time and if anyone wants more detail, just drop me a line at James.Paton@10.128.0.8.

James Paton

James Paton, one of the original SynApps Solutions founders in 2003, has been Customer Services Director for the past seven years. He and former SynApps Director of Sales and Marketing Mark Winstone are now joint Chief Executives of the company, following the decision that founder and fomer CEO Jim Whitelaw is to retire at the end of 2015