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COMMS VISION CONVENTION SPECIAL REPORT
Top trio create big waves as business transformers
THREE stand-out executives became the leading voice of Business Transformation in the final session of day two at Comms Vision 2011.
Ian Cook, CEO of Logicalis
Group, Alastair Mills, CEO of Six Degrees Group, and Justin Harling, Managing Director of CAE Technology Services, have each been instrumental in driv- ing business transformation. In a panel debate they dis- cussed the challenges and oppor- tunities associated with setting out a new growth path for the future of their businesses. Logicalis has transformed from acting as a VAR for spe- cific manufacturers to a broad based IT solutions provider with data centre assets on three con- tinents. Now, Logicalis is an international brand with rev- enues of over $1 billion and is a respected partner of the major technology vendors. Under Cook’s stewardship Logicalis has grown its revenue almost 100 per cent and profits by over 150 per cent. In that time Logicalis has made nine acquisitions and is now estab- lished in 20 countries. Cook said: “We had to figure out how to stay relevant to cus- tomers, vendors and suppliers, and stop being a middle man.
listed company. SpiriTel was backed by Penta Capital and sold to Daisy Plc for £37 mil- lion in November 2010. Prior to SpiriTel, Mills worked at Telewest and KPMG.
(l-r) Ian Cook, Alastair Mills & Justin Harling
We had to change the mix so talked to HP, Cisco and IBM. “Initially we had silos within the business, but gradually they have been put together, now we are taking them apart again as you can’t have everything in one big ball because of the complexity involved.”
Cook examined his compa-
ny’s core business and settled on comms, collaboration, the data centre and cloud services as key focus areas. “We have sales people focused on these areas, and some that look at the whole piece,” added Cook. “We ask questions that get under the skin of the customer, to become more relevant, oth- erwise it just becomes another price battle.”
Harling has witnessed a ‘massive change’ in the prod-
ucts he sells to end users. “A combination of brands fitted into a customer properly is very powerful,” he said. “We see our job as making strategy a reality. You need to know what is going on inside a customer’s business better than anyone else. We want to be the customer’s first port of call pre and post-sales and be embed- ded in their infrastructure. This means having new conversa- tions with the customer based on their business.”
Harling initially led a man- agement buyout in 2004. A second stage buyout was com- pleted in 2010 resulting in CAE Technology Services being 100 per cent owned by the manage- ment team.
OUTSOURCERY’S Sales and Marketing Director Simon Howitt (pictured far left) insists that most resellers are sitting on their hands rather than forming robust future strategies that align with the needs of businesses that want to change the way they operate. “Customers are moving at a fast pace, shaping their strategies and exploring opportunities in the cloud,” he said during a panel debate. “Channel players need to sort out their strategies and live with the applications and products, they need to live the transformation. This way resellers will be far more convincing. A huge responsibility for us is to educate and support partners to ‘eat their own dog food’. We need our partners to have credibility with their customers.”
Following the management buyout turnover has grown by 171 per cent and EBITDA by 585 per cent for the year ending 2011, with sales now in excess of £50 million generated by 115 employees across five offices. Forward planning has been key in Harling’s strategy. “We need to know where we are going next,” he added. “A big challenge is the pace of change. To keep up companies must become agile and adapt. This is also a force for good as it takes out organisations that cannot adapt or add value.”
Mills was CEO of SpiriTel, a position he held from 2005 to 2010. His appointment to that post, aged 32, made him one of the youngest CEOs of a UK-
He formed Six Degrees Group in 2011, backed again by Penta Capital, with the intention of capitalising on the growth of managed data services and cloud convergence. His senior management team from SpiriTel has joined him at Six Degrees Group where several new addi- tions give the team a strong blend of skills and experience. Post-SpiriTel, Mills had a blank sheet of paper and focused on how the market is evolving with an aim to achieve double digit revenue growth. A key change was a big shift to recurring revenues.
“The data centre had to be in the middle of this,” he said. “We bought a MPLS network and are content to do voice too. We are genuinely very different from SpiriTel having core assets in the data centre and exposure to new fast growing markets.” The term ‘fast growth mar-
kets’ inadequately describes the huge potential at Mills’ finger tips. He cited virtual machine revenues up 80 per cent in one month and margins on cloud- based DR solutions as high as 80 per cent.
Mills is also fired up by the prospect of a ‘million pound rack’ within the data centre where numbers certainly stack up quite impressively.
Apart from strategising and restructuring, a common thread that weaves together these transformational stories is the imperative to dig deeper into the business of end users.
“The conversation with the customer has to be busi- ness related,” affirmed Cook. “There has to be justification. Organisations jump through hoops to justify their spending, we have to help them do that.”
Panel debate
THE days are long gone when a simple calls and lines proposi- tion would set you up for life, but according to Gamma’s CEO Bob Falconer this erstwhile pil- lar in the comms temple serves as a solid keystone for the smallest resellers to transform their business by, for example, moving into managed inbound call handling. “It’s easy to migrate into that part of the market and offer a broader solution,” he said in a Comms Vision panel debate. “It’s about taking small steps.” Confused markets don’t buy, so to avoid this unhappy scenar- io resellers need to bring clarity to a fast-moving market with a broad product set designed to align with customers’ more complex requirements.
Those resellers that stride out with small steps stand to gain more as they grow in con- fidence when selling new tech- nologies such as hosted. “It’s not just a different tech-
nology it’s a different commer- cial and service structure, so new skills need to be embed- ded within the business,” added panelist Colin Annette, Client Director at BT Wholesale. Having taken small steps on the path to a new roadmap the big leap for many is working out what the future propositions will look like, but industry pow- erhouse Huawei is clear about its growth strategy.
Michael Rae, Channel Man- ager for Huawei Enterprise UK & Ireland, observed: “The cloud is one of the reasons Huawei entered the enterprise market. “We see the transformation and are now geared up to ser- vice this market.”
Small steps on the road to solutions
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COMMS DEALER DECEMBER 23
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