Ed Higgs, group director of IT shared companies at Rentokil Initial, has been with the pest management and hygiene companies big for greater than a decade. Even after serving to the organisation scale back its datacentre services and transfer to new expertise platforms, Higgs nonetheless has large ambitions for additional change.
“My job isn’t done,” he says. “We continue to grow as an organisation and the job of standardising and consolidating is never really complete. We’ve got targets as a business that we need to carry on meeting, so we will continue to grow.”
Rentokil Initial operates in round 90 nations. Listed on the London Stock Exchange, the corporate was based in 1925 and has continued to develop organically and thru a collection of acquisitions, together with its October 2022 buy of US pest management enterprise Terminix.
Across all enterprise items world wide, Higgs and his workforce intention to ship high-performing expertise that helps efficient working practices. These applied sciences mix to create a standardised and dependable platform for product innovation, resembling utilizing internet-connected traps at consumer websites to identify indicators of infestation mechanically.
Higgs says the continuing goal of this effort is to create what he refers to as “delightful colleague experiences” for workers across the globe. “We’ve got a good idea of what we need to do and we’ve planned out the journey,” he says, suggesting that his workforce will probably be busy with a spread of actions over the subsequent 12 months.
“We’ve got tools that can deliver that work and we’ve got technologies that can help. But what we need to do is make sure that the end-to-end flow and processes are aligned to make sure the delightful colleague experience is consistent whether you’re in the US or Kenya.”
Accepting the chance
Higgs – who hails from Warwick and is an Aston Villa supporter – joined Rentokil Initial in April 2012, having beforehand held senior IT positions at City Link and Manpower. He was eager to tackle the recent alternative of a senior administration place in a giant enterprise.
“They’d been growing quickly and it was at a time when they’d realised they needed global capacity to drive through some consistencies,” he says. “There was an opening in the organisation for someone to own datacentres worldwide.”
During his time on the firm, Higgs has had a collection of promotions and assumed his present function in April 2019. As group director of IT shared companies, he stories to the group CIO. His work relies round three key pillars: buyer companies, office companies and infrastructure companies.
In buyer companies, Higgs covers service desk, service administration, deskside assist and IT fulfilment. In office companies, he oversees person units, the administration of these units, plus collaboration instruments, resembling Google Workspace. In the realm of infrastructure companies, Higgs is accountable for internet hosting, cloud platforms and networks.
“There are two key elements to my role,” he says. “The first part is ensuring that my team delivers those services for the UK, parts of Europe, and the rest of the world. The second element of my role is ensuring that, wherever possible, we are delivering those products and services in a consistent way across 90 countries.”
Dealing with integrations
Higgs “loves” his broad and multifaceted function, the place he works throughout 90 nations across the globe. “I like being challenged – and it’s certainly challenging,” he says, suggesting the acquisitive nature of Rentokil Initial means his workforce is targeted on integration and is at all times trying to find new methods to deliver methods and information collectively successfully.
“We’ve got a fantastic board. They’re absolutely willing to invest in the right technologies, the right services and the right products” Ed Higgs, Rentokil Initial
By manner of an instance, Higgs refers to Rentokil Initial’s latest acquisition of Terminix. He says it’s the most recent in an extended line of purchases, which create necessary goals for his workforce. “We acquire on average just over one company a week,” he says. “And those integrations bring complexities. It’s challenging work, but it’s also fun.”
One of Higgs’ large achievements throughout his time with the enterprise is lowering 77 datacentres world wide into three services based mostly in Europe, Asia and North America. His workforce additionally constructed the technical stack that helps these consolidated datacentres. This course of has taken the stress off expertise operations in nationwide organisations, permitting enterprise items to focus on delivering worth as an alternative of merely managing IT operations.
As properly as on the lookout for alternatives for consolidation and standardisation, Higgs explains how an ongoing seek for digital options to intractable enterprise challenges means his workforce will get to check out what he refers to as progressive applied sciences.
“We have to make sure we don’t take careless risks, but we are willing to be early adopters,” he says. “We’ve got a fantastic board. They’re absolutely willing to invest in the right technologies, the right services and the right products, and have done so over the past few years significantly to make sure that we’re in a really good place in terms of our compliance and our security posture.”
Embracing new applied sciences
When it involves embracing innovation, Higgs provides the instance of software-defined vast space networking (SD-WAN). Just over 5 years in the past, Rentokil Initial was an early adopter of SD-WAN expertise, the place it used the community to assist 700-plus websites throughout 5 continents. More not too long ago, the corporate has been testing and deploying related rodent traps based mostly on the web of issues.
“We’ve got millions of connected devices out there. When a pest goes into one of our connected traps, it sends a message to our central command centre. That means we know when there’s activity and we need to go and visit an organisation,” he says.
“That’s changing the model of the business – instead of going to visit every site every day to check for activity and to look for pests, we can wait until we get an alert from the connected traps. That capability is changing the dynamics of pest control for the better.”
“We’ve got millions of connected devices out there. When a pest goes into one of our connected traps, it sends a message to our central command centre. That means we know when there’s activity and we need to visit an organisation”
Ed Higgs, Rentokil Initial
As properly as offering advantages to the enterprise and its prospects, Higgs says embracing innovation makes it simpler to draw and retain expertise. In an more and more aggressive IT labour market, the flexibility to get maintain of and preserve succesful employees is vital to enterprise success.
“It’s not always easy to attract people into the pest-control industry because it’s not particularly sexy,” he says. “But when we get people in for an interview, they can see everything we’re doing and everything we’re working on. They’re keen to join and then we retain those people. Over the years I’ve been here, we’ve built up a really good team that I love working with – and because they get to do interesting and challenging stuff, they stay.”
Moving to the cloud
Higgs continues to hone his strategy to buyer companies, office companies and infrastructure companies. Across these three core areas, VMware expertise performs a key function.
Rentokil Initial has been a person of the virtualisation platform vSphere for the previous decade. The firm additionally makes use of the machine and utility administration platform Workspace One, which helps with safety, compliance and visibility, and the endpoint safety expertise Carbon Black. Higgs says this mixture of applied sciences makes it straightforward to combine new workers into the enterprise.
“Everything is based on personas, everything’s pre-approved,” he says. “We give them a device; they log in, and – with Workspace One – it downloads all the applications they need to do their jobs. It just makes their initial experience great. And if they change position, we can click a button and put everything they need in the right groups and they get the right apps. It just makes everything so much easier to control.”
Other VMware applied sciences utilized by the enterprise embody the hyperconverged infrastructure technology VSAN and the community virtualisation and security platform NSX. Rentokil Initial additionally not too long ago moved its EMEA datacentre to the infrastructure-as-a-service platform Google Cloud VMware Engine.
Higgs says one of the advantages of utilizing VMware’s stack – significantly Google Cloud VMware Engine – is that the corporate has diminished the quantity of environments it depends on to provision its functions and has been in a position to increase efficiency for customers. With Europe’s datacentre moved to a brand new platform, the agency’s different two services are subsequent.
“We haven’t consolidated the other two global datacentres yet,” he says. “We’re adhering to the hardware refresh lifecycle, so we’ve got the Asia and US datacentres to deal with towards the end of 2023. We’ve also got a new a new datacentre in Memphis, following our purchase of Terminix, but we haven’t started detailed planning yet.”
Taking the subsequent step
Looking ahead, Higgs says his large precedence for the subsequent 12 months will probably be guaranteeing the profitable integration of Terminix into the Rentokil Initial enterprise.
“Because of their size, the process won’t be as simple as going in and putting in place our usual systems and processes,” he says. “They do some really good stuff. It will be very much about a meeting of minds and using the best of both organisations.”
Another key focus will probably be safety. “That’s about keeping one step ahead of the people who are trying to infiltrate us,” he says, earlier than suggesting that Carbon Black will play a key function and likewise assist make sure that any newly bought enterprise is securely built-in into the broader organisation.
“We need to act quickly,” he says. “We can’t have a backlog because, if we wait, we might have another 10 acquisitions to deal with after a couple of months. We need to make sure we can provision new capacity as quickly as possible and that’s one of the major benefits of our integrated technology platform.”
