About Sembee
Sembee is me
I'm Simon Butler. I started Sembee in 2003 and have worked independently in IT ever since. I work mainly with MSPs and IT teams, providing technical mentoring, advanced technical support and specialist Microsoft 365 and Exchange experience.
The story
More than 20 years of doing the work
Sembee started as a general IT consultancy in 2003. I began specialising in Microsoft Exchange a few years later, but the work has never fitted neatly inside one product.
A problem with Exchange might turn out to be DNS. A migration might involve networking, firewalls, identity, Microsoft 365, applications and a collection of legacy systems that nobody particularly wants to touch. Real IT environments tend not to respect the boundaries between products.
Over the years I have worked with everything from small businesses with only a handful of users to large organisations with thousands. Some have been my own clients; increasingly, much of my work has been alongside MSPs and their technical teams.
That breadth of experience is now a large part of what I offer. Sometimes the requirement is specialist knowledge. Sometimes it is simply having another experienced technical person available who has probably seen something similar before.
Working with MSPs
Another technical person on your side
I have worked alongside MSPs for much of my career. I understand that bringing in somebody external can sometimes feel awkward, particularly when your own client expects you to have all the answers.
I don't see my role as proving that I know more than your engineers. Good technical people encounter things they haven't seen before all the time. Sometimes a problem needs a different pair of eyes, a project needs experience the team doesn't use every day, or everybody is simply too busy to give something the attention it needs.
I can work quietly alongside your engineers and, where appropriate, behind the scenes. You retain the relationship with your client and control of the work.
I also don't actively pursue new managed IT customers. I retain a small number of long-standing business clients, partly because looking after real IT environments keeps me exposed to the same day-to-day problems as the MSP engineers I work with. My relationship with an MSP is there to support its business, not to compete with it.
Technical mentoring
Passing on experience without giving up the keyboard
As my own career has developed, I have become increasingly interested in helping other technical people develop theirs.
I provide regular one-to-one mentoring, particularly for engineers moving into senior technical or technical lead roles. The conversations are based around the work they are actually doing: difficult cases, projects, decisions, troubleshooting and the additional responsibilities that arrive when you become the person other engineers turn to.
I also act as a sounding board for experienced engineers who are already the most senior technical person in their business. Being at the top technically can be surprisingly isolating. Sometimes what you need isn't somebody to solve the problem, but another experienced person to challenge an idea, ask what you might have missed or confirm that your proposed approach makes sense.
I intend to remain hands-on. I think that matters. The usefulness of my mentoring comes from combining experience accumulated over many years with continued exposure to current technical work.
Microsoft Exchange
The specialism that shaped my career
Microsoft Exchange has been a particular specialism since 2006. It has taken me through deployments, upgrades, recoveries, migrations, hybrid environments and eventually the move towards Exchange Online and Microsoft 365.
For many years I was also a Microsoft Exchange MVP. That period brought me into contact with an enormous range of Exchange environments and technical problems, as well as other people working deeply with the product.
Exchange is no longer the whole story, but that background still influences how I work. Email is business-critical, apparently simple changes can have wide consequences, and understanding what surrounds a system is often as important as understanding the system itself.
Today my work includes Microsoft 365, Exchange Online, on-premises and hybrid Exchange, migrations and email deliverability, alongside the wider infrastructure involved in making those systems work.
How I work
Practical beats clever
I like solutions that are understandable, supportable and appropriate for the organisation that has to live with them.
There is usually more than one technically correct way to solve a problem. The cleverest or most complicated answer isn't automatically the best one. A solution still has to be operated, maintained, explained to somebody else and eventually changed again.
I am also quite happy to say when I don't know something. IT is far too broad for anybody to know everything. What experience gives you is a better idea of how to investigate something you haven't seen before, what questions to ask and when another specialist should be involved.
Whether I am doing the work myself or mentoring somebody else, that is the approach I try to bring: understand the actual problem, question assumptions, avoid unnecessary complexity and leave things in a state that somebody else can support.
Independent
No account manager between you and the person doing the work
Sembee has deliberately remained small. When you contact Sembee, you are dealing with me. If we discuss a technical problem, I am the person who will be involved in it. If I mentor one of your engineers, I am the person on the call.
I don't outsource consultancy work to somebody you have never met, and there isn't a sales team handing work over once an agreement has been signed.
That limits how much work I can take on at once, but it is also one of the reasons many of my client relationships have lasted for years.
Away from the keyboard
A little bit about me
I live in Oxfordshire with my wife, our two children and our cats. When I'm not working, family life provides a fairly effective counterbalance to spending too much time thinking about computers.
I've been doing this long enough to remember a very different IT industry from the one we have today. The technology keeps changing, which is part of what has kept the job interesting for more than two decades.
Get in touch
Need another experienced technical person?
If you need help with a difficult problem or project, want to give one of your engineers access to regular technical mentoring, or simply want another experienced person available to talk something through with, get in touch.