FROM THE INDUSTRY
In most interviews I find myself asking my subjects how their businesses cope with geopolitical instability, and this year we certainly seem to be starting with a bang. What are your thoughts as we enter 2025? There is a danger that the crises that we’re in at the moment always appear to be the worst. There hasn’t been a lot of time over the last few years where we haven’t had some geopolitical instability, there hasn’t been some crises going on. You would like to hope that we can get better at mitigating that. I don’t know whether that’s true, but I think there are always world events. There’s always something going on somewhere and we just need to make sure that we stay informed, which I think is incredibly important. Making sure that we understand the facts of what’s happening everywhere and that we stay engaged. Closer to home; tell me a bit about what you are doing. What’s happening for the next year? I’ve been the CEO at Hoptroff for just over a couple of years now. We’re growing pretty rapidly, with customers all over the world and we continue to grow the business. It’s a very niche product, time synchronisation, but it’s something that’s absolutely vital more and more so as the world moves more quickly. Synchronising data that comes from all sources to make sure that every aspect of life is operating on the time. So the world’s time, universal time as opposed to lots of random different examples of a time is really important because otherwise you don’t know what happened when. And that’s what this business is all about. So it’s offering a time synchronisation solution in a manner that is plug and play, no hardware involved. And initially we’ve been on financial services and data centres, but we’re now offering solutions to governments, to media businesses, to power companies, to healthcare companies.
Are you in telecoms and broadband?
Amazingly abstract concept to be selling. That tends to be the conversation we have with lots of people. It’s something that people haven’t really thought about. You take time for granted, but you don’t usually check to see whether it’s accurate. Whereas in fact, if you’re at home, if you’re standing in the kitchen and you look at your watch and your phone and the clock on the microwave, they would all tend to be different. So you don’t actually know which one is correct. If the secret to business is good timing, then we suspect Tim is off to a blinder of a start and Hoptroff is destined for great things indeed. Best of luck and keep in touch!
Yes - operating on the correct time is absolutely vital. Time synchronisation is all about taking a time source from satellite, from GPS, leading it into an atomic clock that is based at a data centre. And then taking the output of that and using that to steer the clocks on servers. And this is all pretty critical because the clocks on servers can drift up to two seconds a day, which means you can very quickly not be operating at the world’s time, universal time, but you’re operating at some random version of your own time. Very quickly things get out of sync. Our solution is agnostic plug-and- play software. And one of the biggest differentiators as well as not relying on hardware and not having to deploy hardware is that we can operate in the cloud in exactly the same way as we operate on premises. So we’re agnostic. So we can synchronise your operations anywhere in the world. So if you are a big bank for example, and you may have operations in the cloud and operations at 10 different data centres, we can synchronise all of them so that all of your servers, whether they’re virtual or real, are operating at exactly the same time down to microsecond levels of accuracy. Fascinating. Are you involved in sports as well? Yes, in fact, for a business of our size, we’re relatively small. There are too many opportunities for us to pursue all of them. So we have to pick and choose. A nice problem to have. Our goal is to grow the business as quickly as we can to move into as many verticals as possible. But sports is another area. Betting is obviously a huge opportunity because again, it comes back to that critical phrase, what happened when. And you need to know that any timestamp that shows the time at which something happened is locked to universal time. And that’s what we’re all about.
www.hoptroff.com
MARCH 2025 Volume 47 No.1
31
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