With Andrew Turner, Rockend
Andrew Turner, the Chief Technology Officer at Rockend Tree is determined to offer the best technology services, build the best property software solutions and create the best customer experience for the property management industry.
Prior to taking on the role at Rockend, Andrew worked for Hot Schedules, a global company offering services to large customers with very large volumes of data. He says, “For the last four years, I have helped companies take their services from a local Australian audience through to a global audience and move their systems into the cloud, using Amazon Web Service, to provide 24/7."
He says, “Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are two mature cloud platforms. We predominantly use Microsoft Azure here at Rockend, but always keep a keen eye on what is available from all cloud platforms.” Andrew intends to bring that understanding to Rockend and ultimately to Rockend’s customers. He says, “Moving forward, we will be using a hybrid approach, so we will use the best of all of the Cloud services available, rather than just locking ourselves into one."
Andrew sees his role as one that can only provide world class products to customers if the team around him are outstanding team players. “I am building an engineering department that can recruit and retain top engineering talent to deliver the services we need for our industry. How do you do that? Technology is just technology. There's a lot of tech available. There's a lot of ways we can deliver quality services to our customers. It's really about the team. It's about the people. It's about the ‘who’, not the ‘what’. What I want to do here with Rockend in the engineering team is to first, make sure we have exactly the right people and the right positive culture. Make sure we have the right attitude and we have team players, not just technical gods that bring with them an ego and arrogance that can destroy a team."
Once he has got the right people who have great tech skills, Andrew says, “Then we have a team that can achieve anything. So my role is to build out that team, to put together the frameworks, policies, processes, patterns and practises and to bring in largescale agile development to enable this team to deliver high quality products, at a good velocity and to drive this business forward to offering a successful global digital platform."
Andrew believes that the Cloud can really liberate the working lives of Principals. He explains first exactly what the Cloud is. He says, "The Cloud is a suite of Infrastructure and services made available by major players such as Amazon and Microsoft. We are using these mature cloud platforms to rapidly build and deliver quality, low cost, secure, scalable products to our customers." Some Principals are concerned with the security the Cloud offers compared to the server in their office. Andrew responds, “Wherever we host our systems and customers data, it is important that we put in place the mechanisms and the layers of security to protect our customers’ data. It's not really where it's housed as much as the policies and the principles and the engineering practises that we follow as a company."
Andrew thinks the Cloud can allow Principals to focus on their business rather on the infrastructure and on the systems. He says, “The cloud actually decreases the risk of many of our customers. With desktop products, our customers are responsible for the infrastructure, back-ups and Disaster Recovery There is a lot of risk with having all of that inside a small business which may not have the funds or the capabilities to support that level of infrastructure in-house. Also, by moving to the Cloud, our customers free themselves up from the desk. They can use their mobile devices more from outside of the office to run their business. They can free themselves up from all of this and just focus on the business."
He adds, “We are embracing a multi-function device strategy which means we will use the mobile phone for functionality that it is best suited for mobile; we will use tablets for functionality best suited to tablets. There will always be a need for laptop and desktop access to our systems because of some of the larger administration and back-of-house system type functionality which have a need for a larger screen real-estate. We will leverage from every device and we will leverage from the different Cloud providers to deliver fast, quality services to the property industry."
Is it time you moved your business to the Cloud?