CEO Today Business Women of the Year Awards

25 www.ceotodaymagazine.com CEO Today Business Women of the Year Awards 2018 UNITED KINGDOM NIKI REDWOOD Finance Director of Nasstar FIRM PROFILE Nasstar is a provider of managed IT solutions and tailor-made cloud hosted solutions delivering innovative, secure and agile IT to help clients accomplish their business objectives. Nasstar provides a true end to end service for clients providing them with enhanced IT performance and greater cost control over their IT function. Nasstar owns its primary data centre, is head quartered in Telford with regional offices in Northampton, London and Bournemouth whilst 24x7 support is delivered from its Auckland office in New Zealand. Nasstar is an accredited Microsoft Gold Partner, is the 2016 Citrix Networking Partner of the Year and is certified to ISO 27001. Nasstar specialises in building bespoke cloud hosted services to manage a client’s entire application set, tailor made to suit specific industries, designing public, private and hybrid cloud solutions to meet the objectives of the client. The solution is a highly scalable service that provides benefits including “Anywhere Access” to computing; a standardised corporate solution that can be accessed globally in multiple languages; generating cost savings when compared to the traditional IT ownership model whilst replacing capital expenditure with a simple usage based payment model. Nasstar was founded in 1998, admitted to AIM in December 2005, acquired e-know.net in a reverse takeover in January 2014, Kamanchi in July 2014, VESK in October 2015 and Modrus in September 2016. Our Story Nasstar started out in life as a company called e-know.net , founded in 1998 by Nasstar’s now retired non-executive Deputy Chairman, David Redwood. David founded e-know.net after famously coming out of retirement because Mrs. Redwood got sick of having him around the house. Before attempting to retire, David had previously founded a systems integration business called Largotim in 1979 that he grew into a £60m business before selling to TRW in 1997. David´s previous experience was important to e-know.net , because it was only after retiring that David realised the key barriers to sales at Largotim were high capital and operational costs on his customers part. First of all, the software that was being sold was expensive, the server infrastructure required to run the software was also expensive, as was running a skilled and incumbent IT department to manage the whole software and hardware stack, each of these were significant barriers to adoption of the software David used to sell and in retrospect the solution was obvious. Before the cloud, or hosted services had been invented, David decided that his next venture would be a business that hosted software in its data centres, delivered that software to the customer over the internet and charged for access to it on a predictable per user, per month basis, solving all of the previous problems that he had experienced at his previous company. In 1998 such a service did not have a name, but over the years it got called ASP (application service provider), hosting, managed hosting, SaaS and is now commonly described as ‘cloud computing’. e-know.net was born and setup from day one to host customers data and software, delivering that back to them on a per user per month basis. The DNA of the business from day one was fully hosted and fully managed services, with huge amounts of technical support made available on a 24/7 basis. ABOUT NIKI REDWOOD Nasstar’s Finance Director, Niki has been integral to the success of Nasstar since the inception, and it really is a family affair. The current CEO Nigel, is Niki’s sister and both Nigel and Niki’s father is the founder of the business, David Redwood. The Early Years Having obtained a BSc in Mathematical Sciences at Bath University, Niki qualified as an ACA with KPMG, winning regional prizes in both intermediate and final exams, and became a FCA in 2008. Niki worked in KPMG’s small business division from 1993 to 1996 before joining e-know.net in 1999, initially as Financial Controller, before becoming Finance Director in 2006. At the time when David was setting up the business, Niki had just returned from travelling the world, whilst travelling she worked for KPMG in Brisbane as well as undertaking number accountancy projects for businesses in Sydney Australia. Upon her return, after running her own events management company for a while, David asked Niki to help him set up e-know.net, Niki agreed, telling her father ‘I will help you out for a few months’ and 18 years later, Niki is still Nasstar’s Finance Director, still core to the growth and development of the business. CONTACT E: niki.redwood@nasstar.com W: www.nasstar.com T: +44 1952 225 058