Editorial

The Digital Contenders, 20: Matrix Booking

Leading the way in supporting the UK government hubs initiative, Matrix Booking provides a range of resource booking modules for organisations of any size – providing the engine that holds together any estate

Posted 18 July 2018 by Gary Flood


Based in the heart of London’s Covent Garden, Matrix Booking allows secure collaboration across local and central government, ensuring departments get the most from their space. We sat down with its Managing Director, Kieron Murphy, to find out more

Welcome to the Digital Marketplace Contenders, Mr Murphy. let’s start by telling us about your company; what is Matrix Booking’s value proposition?

Matrix Booking is an organisation wholly owned by Keytree Ltd, an international award-winning design and technology consultancy and product developer. The Matrix Booking suite is the leading resource management SaaS suite in the UK public sector – open, secure and specifically designed to be quick and easy to implement. 

 Appropriate for the requirements of modern organisations of all sizes, Matrix Booking is award-winning software that enables smarter, flexible working via a rich functionality to manage a range of resources including meeting rooms, desks, car parking, catering, equipment and even transport. 

The recent evolution of workplaces and working practices has meant an unprecedented change in the way workers interact with their estates and systems. It is no longer sufficient to provide systems that assist in optimising a single organisation and their resources. The new challenge is to build truly dynamic networks of resources that are both open and secure, providing users with a much wider choice of resources and locations from which to choose their ideal working environment. The unique Workplace Collaboration functionality in the Matrix Booking suite is being used to provide these dynamic estates networks in central and local government today.

What is its relevance for the public sector? Do you have any examples of organisations in the sector that have used you successfully?

The public sector is leading the way in the UK in terms of flexible working and estates collaboration. There are multiple UK-wide hubs programmes, which are helping to rationalise the government estate while providing a wider choice of workplace options to civil servants.

The ability, provided by Matrix Booking, to openly and securely collaborate and share estates has meant that central government and local councils, emergency services and charities are able to optimise their space usage and in most cases, reduce their individual estate footprint while providing wider choices for their staff through shared networks.

Matrix Booking powers the largest collaboration hub programmes in the UK public sector today. We are proud to be the power behind the flagship HMRC and GPA hubs as well as the award-winning Ministry of Justice commuter hubs. In local government, we have helped clusters of councils in Cambridge, Staffordshire and Hampshire to create local government hubs that include county, borough and district councils as well as the emergency services.

How did you find the process of on-boarding onto the Marketplace, and do you have any guidance or others on the basis of that experience?

The on-boarding process is straightforward, although if a company is applying to G-Cloud for the first time answering all the questions can be time consuming – but it’s worth the effort as the data collected serves as very good introductory documents for potential customers in the public sector

I would have two suggestions to new applicants; be clear about your product and pricing, and go easy on the generic marketing material. Matrix Booking wins a huge amount of business through the Marketplace and we know from our customers that it is the clear pricing and product information that helps us get shortlisted. Lots of our competitors submit vague pricing, which means that they fall at the first hurdle.

If ThinkDigitalPartners came back to talk to you in a year, what would you like to be able to say you’d achieved in the public sector IT space?

I would like to say that we have become known by users in the public sector as the service to use when looking for a flexible workspace – whether that be within your own building, organisation, government hub or authorised private sector flexible working facility. I would also like to add that we have consolidated our position as the market-leading provider of Workplace Collaboration hubs, and have continued to assist the Government Property Agency and HMRC in their expansion of the hub networks.

Furthermore, I hope that more local government organisations realise the opportunity they have to save money and increase staff choice through similar Workplace Collaboration hubs with local organisations.

Finally, we are aiming to further revolutionise the public sector workplace with two exciting new Matrix Booking products that will provide even more choice and efficiency savings, which we are due to release in the coming months – so watch this space.

Thank you for your time, Mr Murphy – and good luck!