Digital transformation is affecting almost every industry, whether it’s banking, manufacturing, retail, transportation, energy, and more. With the rise in data-driven marketing strategies, today’s companies are becoming agile, people-oriented, innovative, modernized, efficient, and more customer-centric. Many businesses are starting to perceive the potential of digital to engage customers externally as well as streamlining internal processes. One of the leading companies providing the best digital solutions, with over 14 years of successfully blending creative and digital knowhow, is VerseOne.
Headquartered in Surrey, England, VerseOne Group is a well-established and successful digital services and technology integration organization. The mission of the company is to deliver highly-personalized, functional, and beautifully-crafted digital transformation solutions that offer the best engagement and experience for anyone accessing its customers’ business content.
The company blends deep knowledge of its target market sectors with powerful web applications and other best-of-breed technologies and services to create customized, cutting-edge, and value-for-money web and mobile solutions for customers.
Smart Solutions and Services
“We put our customers’ requirements at the heart of what we do by helping them cut through the online noise to deliver their content and messages to their target audience on any device and in an intelligent, personalized and effective way.”
Content is essential for brand building; it is the most vital asset for any business. VerseOne believes that effective and intelligent managing and sharing of business content creates unique competitive advantages and real return on investment. They understand the importance of organizational content and invest heavily to provide secure software solutions to its clients. Its abilities to transform business content have been acknowledged by various global leaders.
Since its inception, VerseOne has focused on providing easily adaptable and completely reliable web solutions. It gives web technology platforms and digital and creative services to the social housing, healthcare, local government, and broader commercial markets. The prime focus is to provide advanced solutions that deliver real value and return on investment (ROI), whilst being incredibly easy to deploy and having a low and predictable cost of ongoing ownership. VerseOne’s digital services and technology platforms power over 200 websites, intranets, secure portals, and stakeholder management solutions.
Torchbearer of VerseOne
A fervent leader who has passion for innovation and the ability to think creatively, Alan Neilson is the Founder and Executive Chairman of VerseOne Group. He earned his BSc degree in Computer Studies and has the wide experience that comes of more than 30 years in IT. Alan also acts as a director, adviser and investor for several IT and technology startup companies. Alan was the CEO and one of the founding directors of royalblue technologies plc—a wholly owned subsidiary of royalblue group plc (now Fidessa group plc, FDSA.L). He was involved in all aspects of growing that company from a small start-up in 1991 to a highly successful and dominant software and services organisation where he sat on the main board. During his 15 years at royalblue he gained experience of corporate finance, due diligence and acquisitions as part of the company’s growth—which culminated in the IPO on the London Stock Exchange in 1997. At VerseOne, Alan is responsible for the company’s current and long-range strategy formulation and execution to maximize the group’s success through delivering innovative and value-for-money solutions to customers.
Accolades and Recognition
VerseOne has received numerous recognitions and awards for its exemplary digital transformation solutions, including:
- VerseOne has been recognized twice by Red Herring as one of the top 100 technology companies in Europe and by CIO as one of the global top 20 CMS providers.
- The company has been shortlisted as Technology Company of the Year 2017 by the UK National Technology Awards.
- VerseOne has held ISO 9001 certification since 2012 and Investors in People since 2015, testimony to the commitment to well-defined and rigorous processes and methodologies in everything the company does, and the high value placed on, and the quality of, the people working within the company.
A Culture of Creativity and Innovation
Nurturing a culture of innovation accompanies a preloaded advantage of improved employee engagement and better solutions to business challenges. The company has a flat management structure and encourages employees to think outside of the box. They strongly believe in listening and taking on board ideas and suggestions from staff, customers, partners, and other stakeholders. VerseOne provides equal opportunity as well as scope to everyone to exercise initiative and execute. Fundamentally, they don’t believe in or practice micro-management: they believe that with the right culture and processes in place, people and customers can be both creative and innovative within a framework of quality and collaboration.
Secret Behind VerseOne’s Success
The company considers the people that make up the team within the business as the biggest asset and empowers them to make prolific contributions toward achieving the company’s vision. Equally important are the customers: it is crucial to connect with them, understand their needs, and add value to business. Moreover, the company believes that the right culture is also one of the factors behind its success: communication a key mantra and a cornerstone of the business’s culture, be it internally or externally with customers.
Overcoming Challenges
In this era of digital disruptions, players in the technology sphere are facing increasing stress to improve time to market and ensure their offerings are best in class. For VerseOne, the biggest challenge was to find and convince the early adopter companies they approached that they had the resources and the commitment to deliver on their vision. In spite of the to-be-expected setbacks, they kept the confidence and the determination alive until the right champion customers presented themselves. Moreover, the company was entirely funded by the founders; this self-imposed limitation on finances also presented real challenges.
These challenges have taught some important lessons. ‘If you really believe in your vision and feel it would make a significant difference to the market sector you have in mind, don’t give up and keep searching and pushing forward. With hindsight, we would’ve secured external finance earlier in the company’s life which would’ve allowed us to propel the business forward much more rapidly.’
A Roadmap for Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is game-changing and its providers are indispensable. It is not just about being digital: at heart, it is about remodeling business strategies to be customer-centric, agile, and innovative. Explaining the disruptive approach, the founder of the company says, “a business idea looking for a solution is much less likely to succeed than a business idea that is either addressing an existing need or improving on how it’s being addressed.” He envisions more extensible and future-proofed product and service offerings. The company evaluates the latest products, best practice methods, and design trends to ensure its offerings remain cutting-edge.
Featuring the Future
The commitment to the customer experience by everyone at VerseOne also enables the company to take a long view. The company is constantly evaluating the latest products, best practice methods, design trends, and how best to incorporate these into the offerings. VerseOne ensures its solutions are extensible and future-proofed, developed using open standards to provide vigorous integration with the customers’ existing business technology platforms. It is also the source of the commitment to security and data protection, with all of VerseOne’s hosted solutions located in ISO 27001 data centers within the United Kingdom.
