Customer Case Study: Manchester Science Parks

Alright, so tell me who you are and what you do.

I’m Jane Davies. I’m Chief Executive of Manchester Science Parks and essentially I’m a landlady and a Melbourne customer.

Just tell me a little bit more about Manchester Science Parks

Manchester Science Parks was founded in 1984 in the middle of another recession to help create jobs from the knowledge that was being created in the universities, on land immediately adjacent to the university campus. And since then we’ve helped companies, spin-out companies, spin-in companies, start ups to actually grow and prosper, all of them in the high technology field.

Okay, fine. There are a lot of companies offering internet services. Why did you choose Melbourne?

We chose Melbourne because they were one of our tenants and we try hard to give our business to our tenants if it’s appropriate. We had another tenant providing services and we were unhappy with the service levels, so we looked around to see who else was delivering those services – internet connectivity mainly – and Melbourne had a good offer. They were competitive in price. We’d seen the company grow from one person to a much stronger, much bigger company, and so we knew their reputation and that seemed to us to be a good reason to go with them.

So have you regretted your decision?

We haven’t regretted our decision at all. Melbourne’s service is very good. They’re very responsive, and when we’ve reported incidents or problems to them which are nothing to do with them they’ve been very helpful in helping us solve them even though it was nothing to do with the service that they were providing.

Are they constantly on the phone to you trying to sell you other products and services? Do you think it’s a high pressure organisation?

Not at all. The only time we’ve received a cold call was to invite me to do this testimonial!

Okay. I know that you don’t have day-to-day responsibility for the network and the intranet and everything like that, but have you got any comment to make about network speeds, or outages, or the reliability of the service?

As far as I’m aware, the reliability is very good. We’ve only had two outages in the last 12 months, neither anything to do with Melbourne’s service. We also use their Spam filter and that’s excellent. It really has cut down on the amount of spam that we have to put up with, which is a great relief.

So what would you say to other companies looking for – who were perhaps on the Science Park or on the peripheries of the science park looking for internet services.

If our other tenants asked me to recommend somebody to provide Internet connectivity I’d be happy to recommend Melbourne. We take recommendation very seriously and only recommend companies that we have personal knowledge of, and I’d be very happy to recommend Melbourne.

Do you know, when there is a problem, when they phone up, is it like any old person who answers the phone or is there a dedicated account handler?

If we have a problem we contact our main account manager, but everybody who answers the phone is very helpful and takes ownership of the problem, which is what you want.

Now Daniel has been a bit of a gypsy in the science park hasn’t he? Can you tell me about his history and how many times he’s moved?

Well, Daniel (Melbourne’s MD) came to us 5 years ago, and started in our Greenheys building, with one of the smallest offices. He’s expanded in Greenheys. He’s also taken space in Reynolds House and opened a data centre there and then he took a small office here in Turing House, and finally he moved into his new office and datacentre; and it’s definitely the coolest office on the science park!

So do you think that you’ll keep him here?

Well, I hope so. I mean we always like to keep our best tenants, and certainly Melbourne is an excellent case study for the science park, showing how a company can start here very small and grow to be quite a significant player. We try to be as flexible as we can when a tenant asks to take more – or less – space since we understand how difficult it can be for a growing company to plan ahead. I also think, given the investment that Daniel has made in his facilities, that it would be quite expensive for him to leave us, so I hope very much that he’ll expand on the site.