E23 - Alex Morrison at Bright Cloud Group

During this episode, our Co-Founder George Barnes sat down with Alex Morrison, the CEO and Director at Bright Cloud Group. The pair discuss his journey into Networking alongside what technology he can see shaping the future and the value university had on his career.

While studying for his Computer Science degree at university, he took on an advanced networking course. He was massively unprepared for the working world but because of the software development elements of that course, he was able to transfer those skills into his first real job.

Alex left university in 2001 and from that point wasn’t sure what exactly he wanted to do or what career he wanted. He stumbled upon a role as a Software Engineer with ERA Technology which focused primarily on the Telecommunications space. When he started, because it was fairly new, within 3 months he got sent to Boston to the Cisco offices out there to do a training course on IPCC Express. During his time out there, he was building out Contact Centre and was thrown into the deep end massively.

“What employees have to understand is, and I think most do, is that actually, the people who are coming out of university are demonstrating their ability to go out and actually continue learning for another 3 years”.

Some of the technology Alex sees as being a huge game changer in the future is the availability of tech-like cloud capabilities. An interesting thought but technology like speech recognition, biometrics and voice enable metric service for people to reset their passwords alongside fingerprint and facial recognition.

More on Bright Cloud…

Bright Cloud provides the technology, platform, and managed services. Their aim is to help their customers create great customer experiences for their clients. They have their own technology built around their own cloud-based platform and services. Not only that but everything you see in a Contact Centre they can provide and are very heavy on keeping up with customer demands.

Walking through his hiring process, the non-negotiables Alex looks for when hiring is soft skills. In actual fact, he says that he chooses soft skills over everything else.  Your technical side can be taught whereas soft skills cannot. You have to have a huge love for technology, which is a given, but you have to want to solve customer problems, think outside the box and be a self-learner.

When working in this industry, things aren’t always going to go to plan. And in this instance, it went terribly wrong. Alex spent 3 months on a deployment for a new Contact Centre. He was a week away from GoLive and he had built one of the raid controllers on one of the servers incorrectly. He had to turn all the virtual machines off, reconfigure the server, had to move, delete, and then put them back together. Once he moved everything across, he deleted the primary server, which they were reconfiguring but deleted 3 months’ worth of work from both sides of the platform and ultimately spent the entire weekend rebuilding the Contact Centre.

This brings us to the end of the episode, where we have our quick-fire round… 4 questions, and 4 brilliant answers. Make sure you tune in to listen now!