Blue Chip puts its money where its cloud is to fuel growth

VAR Blue Chip has invested in cloud in a big way as part of a strategic shift towards services to fuel growth plans.

The £18m-turnover firm, based in Poole, has 180 staff and counts Microsoft, VMware, EMC, Cisco and Citrix as key vendor partners. The company specialises in serving mid-market customers and, over the last few years, has driven its services sales to stand at more than 60 per cent of total revenue.

Blue Chip sales and marketing director Anthony Green said: "In the last three or four years, our mindset has significantly changed. Previously, we acquired the customers by doing a project and then maybe acquired some service desk business off the back of that, if they wanted it. Now the mindset is to help them with their whole strategy."

The move towards services has "fuelled a huge amount of reinvestment" in the business, Green told ChannelWeb. Money has been spent on upping service desk employee numbers to 40, opening a datacentre at its Dorset headquarters, as well as two new training facilities in the Solent region and a new website which launches this week.

The VAR also recently laid out about £500,000 on hardware to give it clout as a wide-ranging cloud services provider. Bigger cloud vendors often offer customers specific services in a "vanilla" way, claimed Green, but Blue Chip can provide a more bespoke-style service that can incorporate customers' niche applications.

"As a business, we do not mandate which choice is right for any given customer," he added. "It may be hosted, but, if that's not right for them, we are very happy to equip them with traditional infrastructure onsite.

"We are seeing that backup is a first step [towards the cloud] for a lot of people. But some customers are taking the once-every-four-years refresh opportunity to rip the whole lot out and move to the cloud."

Green admitted the recession has slowed top-line growth a little, but said the firm still delivered double-digit increases in the last couple of years and is planning for more of the same in FY12.

"We are very much still in a building phase with the business and the business model is about client acquisition," he explained. "The way we have grown the business is to work really hard to acquire those customers and we want that long-term relationship."