This year is an important one for The Network Collective as we’re celebrating 20 years of delivering truly independent telecoms and network expertise.  

So, it’s only right that we share the story about how we got here. 

We sat down with Founder and industry expert John Waterhouse, who takes us back to the very beginning and shares the story behind The Network Collective, the challenges we overcame, and the vision that continues to drive us forward. 

Why did you start The Network Collective? 

I’d been running network procurement for a major managed services company, so I was spending my life negotiating contracts with telcos on behalf of their customers. I was getting quite frustrated because my team and I were developing all of this amazing insight into the market, but most of the time the end customer didn’t get the benefit because the company I worked for kept losing bids!   

One day I had a “light bulb moment” – maybe those end customers would value our advice directly, whoever they bought their network from? That was the moment the seed was planted, and about six months later TNC was born.  

What was the problem you were trying to solve?

The problem we were trying to solve is the same problem we are solving today – network and telecoms services are the foundations on which every organisation builds its IT strategy, but network and telecoms services are complicated and the market changes really quickly.  Because organisations only buy these services every few years, that makes it hard for them to build up the knowledge to make sure they are buying the right services from the right providers, backing the right technologies, and paying the right price.  

Our vision was that we could develop those insights and deliver them to every organisation that needs them, exactly when they need them. That would allow them to get the very best possible outcomes, making their world a better place.  

What was the biggest challenge early on?   

So many! From what are we going to call our company, to how are we going to package our services, to where to put our first office. We solved those ones, but the biggest challenge was getting heard – we were doing something genuinely new in the market, that no-one else was doing, so we found that not everyone “got it” straight away.   

We quickly realised we needed to identify those people with the vision to see how our expertise and insights could benefit them, and that’s how we started to build our customer base – finding those sparky individuals who were prepared to think a bit outside the box.  

What makes TNC different from competitors?   

Of course, we’ve got amazing people, and fantastic data and insights, but our most unique feature is our fierce independence. From the very first day of TNC, we knew that the only way to really deliver the value our customers want is to be completely and utterly independent – meaning we have no ties to any service provider, and we act solely for the benefit of every one of our customers.  

That was the central pillar 20 years ago and it still is today, and it is what has enabled us to build so many deep partnerships of trust with our customers – they know it is a rare and valuable commodity, and they know we have it. 

Proudest moment so far?   

Every Christmas lunch! Year after year, seeing the table get longer and longer, with more and more super talented, enthusiastic TNCers is an absolute joy.  It’s so easy to focus through the year on all the actions that need to be done every day, and we don’t have the chance to get the whole team together too often, so having everyone there, dressed up to the nines, is a fabulous reminder of how the business has grown, how great the TNCers are, and how much we’ve achieved together  

What’s your vision for the next 5 – 10 years?  

The short answer is that there is still so much to do.  The network and telecoms market continues to flex and change, so our customers need us more than ever to help them navigate it and get the best possible outcomes. But the challenges our customers are facing are growing.   

As the boundaries blur between networks, security, and cloud, the opportunities to do amazing things are growing, but the risks of backing the wrong technologies, selecting the wrong partners, or failing to stay on top of your solutions are growing much bigger.  

Our vision in many respects remains the same – deliver independent insight and expertise to our customers to help them get the best possible outcomes, but we expect the technologies over which we deliver this expertise will grow – as they’ve always grown.   

20 years ago, TNC just did networks, then we gradually branched out into telephony, contact centres, mobility, LAN, and now into AV, security, and cloud.  That’s the world we are in – it doesn’t stand still so we don’t stand still, but what matters is that our values remain the same – to be our customers’ trusted partners, and always independent. 

​

How can TNC help?

TNC has been developing a toolkit to help our customers navigate all of these challenges, and to enable them to de-risk, and accelerate their programme for analogue switch-off.   This toolkit includes a unique platform called Clarity which enables all stakeholders to have a single view of the programme, a “single version of the truth” inventory, and automates many aspects of migration including cost control, site visibility, actions updates, and benefits realisation.   Of course, this toolkit is built on a fantastic team of highly experienced consultants who can lead and support your transformation to make it as successful as possible.   Get in touch with us to set up a personalised session and we will reveal more of what we have found and discuss your specific challenges and how we can help – click here to arrange a call with one of our experts: https://www.networkcollective.co.uk/lets-talk/   

TNC holds over 4.3m active market data points covering WAN, data networks, fixed voice and mobility

More

Insight, blogs and white papers