6th January 2003
IT Resources CTO, Scott Worley interviewed in Biz Shanghai magazine.

The following article was featured in Issue 21 of Biz Shanghai, published December 2002:

Scott Worley arrived in Shanghai a year ago to set up and develop the regional office of Beijing-established IT Resources. A combination of years’ worth of consulting in the IT field, and a Shanghainese wife, has led Scott to make his home in the city, and during his hectic schedule he of course found some time to talk to BizShanghai about himself, his company and its plans for Shanghai.

In a nutshell, give us a brief profile of ITR, and yourself.
A part of the IT Group, IT Resources began operations in 1996 with Chinese, US and European investment. With over 130 staff members and 15 expatriates and offices in Beijing and Shanghai, ITR is one of few systems integrators with Western management operating throughout China. This year ITR was recognized by the MII as one of the top 5 enterprise integrators in China. As for me, basically 10 years in IT, in industry-side systems hardware and software, and now a year with ITR.

How is the Shanghai office working out?
We are in the process of moving into a much larger office in Shanghai, to house 30-40 employees. We have to build up the office and focus on gaining a locally recognisable presence in the city, and within the next 6 months I expect to have more than 20 highly-trained staff. We currently have a full sales team, who are the frontline along with Customer Service staff, and are split between physical infrastructure (i.e. cabling, machine room design) and systems integration, our two core business areas. When we say systems integration, this includes telecoms, data networking and core enterprise software applications.

Tell me more about the services you offer.
Anything from machine room design, consulting and training, to structured cabling solutions, data services, and telecommunications systems. We provide PBX installation and maintenance, LAN and WAN design and implementation, fibre optic solutions, basically and organizations’ whole data network needs from the ground up. We install the phone system for clients, then data cabling and networking, then the server side of things including any software associated to the server, followed by training, project management services and outsourcing of ongoing maintenance work. So we offer a very comprehensive service – a complete solution. Of course, a number of companies claim to offer “complete solutions” so the more important point is that what we do offer is backed up by over 100 staff members and 6 years of experience in making those solutions actually work here in china. We are also involved in software development, and are currently developing a bi-lingual CRM system.

Do you target specific businesses/industries?
Yes, I am targeting multinational companies and joint ventures at the moment. Multinational companies often realise the need for the complete IT solution for their offices more so than local companies. They are also ready to invest more into their IT systems. If you compare Shanghai to many other Western cities, it is very advanced technically, but the actual knowledge of how to apply and use this technology is just not here yet. Even most joint-ventures are locally managed, so the focus remains strongly on the multinationals as we can offer them the entire solution range. As time goes on and companies get bigger and business becomes more integrated, more local companies will realise where these solutions will pay for themselves.

What is the most challenging aspect of your business?
Actually there are very few companies providing comparable services to us, so in most cases, if we can make contact with customers when they are in the design phase, we can provide exactly the type of support they are looking for. The problem is that many companies simply don’t know where to look.

Once we achieve a certain level of confidence and trust with our customers, the relationship tends to become a long-term one that works well for both sides. From our viewpoint, a good relationship is important from a commercial and financial standpoint, and for the customer, it means that they can trust us for any solution we propose, and can be sure that they are not being taken advantage of.

Why would a MNC choose ITR rather than bringing in its own IT staff?
Cost, relocation, staffing issues. A company like ITR provides experienced, knowledgeable, resident staff, and as a local company we can then provide a range of services on a 24-hour, 7 days-a-week basis rather than a multinational relying on its few staff transferred from overseas. We can also offer multilingual support as we hire both local and foreign staff, and we have better access to the local market for sourcing our supplies without paying a premium.

You also have published IT-related works?
I recently wrote a book on Microsoft’s latest technology platform, their ASP.NET web development framework. That was published in November 2001. And I am now doing a follow up on .NET Compact Framework, a core technology that is just hitting the market at the moment.

How do you find local competition?
There are a lot of local IT companies who are very professional – much more than I had expected. This means you cannot be complacent. However, almost all are much smaller than we are, so they can seldom offer the type of broad support we can. Moreover, we can draw on both Chinese and Western resources to design solutions, and this can often give us an extra edge. Of course, if a company is simply looking for a piece of hardware at the lowest possible price, then our “solution-oriented” approach may not be attractive.

Other Company Qualifications?
We are the China general distributor for Corning Cable Systems, which is the leading manufacturer of fibre-optic cable in the world and key systems integrations partner of Siemens Business Communications Systems. In addition, we have partnerships a number of other top manufacturers, such as Cisco, IBM, HP, 3Com, Avaya, Nortel, Enterasys, Citrix and Microsoft. With Microsoft we have a distribution partnership, solution provider partnership for software development and are also certified partners. Every few months we add more and more as we bring on more resources to support those partnerships.