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Founded eight years ago, Cirencester-based Trust Systems has grown to include clients such as HMV, Waterstone’s and Co Op. Sophia Murray asks commercial director Mike Dowson about the company’s hardware services as well as new technologies that are keeping the company ahead of the curve.
Tell us how Trust Systems got started and a little bit about how the company grew its client list.
It all started eight years ago by Nick Potts who is now my business partner. At the time the company started, it was about four people.
Over the years, Nick has grown the business, moved the office to where we are currently and in 2013 he got to the stage where he got some really great solutions and got some good customers – but he needed to grow the board and the capabilities of the business.
Nick approached me, I took some shares in the company and we set up a new holdings company together that now owns Trust Systems and Agility Data Solutions.
Where is the company now?
In 2015 we expanded our clients to include the likes of the Cooperative. As a result, we provide managed Wi-Fi solutions to 250 Co-op stores on a five-year contract.
What types of products and services do you provide and how do they work?
We have some RFID smart tag solutions. We have a digital platform that we can either do as a public cloud or private cloud solution and a digitized platform for customer engagement.
We also have a smart voucher solution that we can effectively deploy very quickly at a much lower cost than our competition. I feel that puts us at a step ahead of the pack.
Who is the typical Trust Systems customer?
We’re very big in retail, so we do a lot of smart technology solutions in retail and provide managed services to them. Everything from the mundane application hosting and backup as a service (BaaS) technologies all the way through to now some of the more exciting internet of things (IoT) devices.
Do you have any niche products? If so, what?
Our Wi-Fi and digital platform is probably our most niche product. Now that’s not to say that other companies don’t do similar things, but it is the way we have packaged it, designed it, secured it and commercialised it all together that makes us stand out.
