RESELLER PROFILE / OPINION
RESELLER PROFILE: TRUST SYSTEMS
Founded eight years ago, Cirencesterbased Trust Systems has grown to include clients such as HMV, Waterstone’s and Co Op. Sophia Murray asks Commercial Director Mike Dowson about the company’s hardware services as well as new technologies that are keeping the company ahead of the curve…
Tell us how Trust Systems got started and a little bit about how the company grew its client list. It all started eight years ago by Nick Potts who is now my business partner. At the time the company started, it was about four people. Over the years, Nick has grown the business, moved the office to where we are currently and in 2013 he got to the stage where he got some really great solutions and got some good customers – but he needed to grow the board and the capabilities of the business. Nick approached me, I took some shares in the company and we set up a new holdings company together that now owns Trust Systems and Agility Data Solutions.
Where is the company now? In 2015 we expanded our clients to include the likes of the Cooperative. As a result, we provide managed Wi-Fi solutions to 250 Co-op stores on a five-year contract. What types of products and services do you provide and how do they work? We have some RFID smart tag solutions. We have a digital platform that we can either do as a public cloud or private cloud solution and a digitized platform for customer engagement. We also have a smart voucher solution that we can effectively deploy very quickly at a much lower cost than our competition. I feel that puts us at a step ahead of the pack.
Who is the typical Trust Systems customer? We’re very big in retail, so we do a lot of smart technology solutions in retail and provide managed services to them. Everything from the mundane application hosting and backup as a service (BaaS) technologies all the way through to now some of the more exciting internet of things (IoT) devices. Do you have any niche products? If so, what? Our Wi-Fi and digital platform is probably our most niche product. Now that’s not to say that other companies don’t do similar things, but it is the way we have packaged it, designed it, secured it and commercialised it all together that makes us stand out.
Trust Systems is a Circenster-based IT solutions reseller. www.trustsystems.co.uk/
Sony is making a mistake by pushing 4k instead of performance Resolution is the big selling point of the PlayStation Pro but Jonathan Easton believes that it is performance – not visuals – that continues to give PC gaming the edge… TUESDAY 7TH SEPTEMBER saw two big reveals capture the attention of the twitterverse (three, if you include the bread challenge facing the contestants of The Great British Bake Off). First up was the announcement of the iPhone 7, but after that we finally got official acknowledgement of gaming’s worst kept secret: the PlayStation Pro. And the big draw of this one? gaming at 4k resolution. While being a nice addition for the few people who have an expensive 4k TV, spending time chasing an upped resolution won’t actually help
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the console to catch up with PC’s technical superiority. What PC has over console that excites gamers isn’t just higher resolutions but much better performance. There is a reason why the vast majority of professional gamers opt for PC when the game is available on console as well; it’s because the games are capable of running much better. The biggest feature that gamers bemoan of the current console generation is the tendency for intensive games to dip in framerate, sometimes even struggling to manage a steady 30fps. While
“Leaning on higher resolution as a system selling point shows that the console is still in no position to drive gamers away from their PCs.”
games like Overwatch use some clever dynamic resolution tricks to maintain 60fps on console, an upgraded PC is capable of maintaining 1080p at a 90plus framerate. While Sony has boosted the insides of the PlayStation Pro, that the company is leaning on the higher resolution instead of improved performance as a system selling point shows that the console is still in no position to drive gamers away from their PCs. Increased performance aside, there is still a big question mark as to how
much the experience of using PlayStation VR will be improved with the Pro. Ultimately, the PlayStation Pro feels like something of a half way house between this generation of console gaming and the next. It is, for sure, better than what’s currently plugged into 40 million-plus TVs, but it’s not quite the revolutionary “highest quality pixels that anybody has ever seen” promised by Microsoft with Project Scorpio. I’m sure that the PlayStation Pro will sell lots, but in chasing higher resolutions consoles could fall further behind.
PCR October 2016 | 43