Managing director, DMSL
Career so far I started on a market stall in Whitechapel selling PCs to dockers (not all that far from the truth). I built up Brother printer business from scratch in the 1980s, establishing it as one of the leading players in the printer market. I later worked as a consultant to BT and formed DMSL in 2002, growing the business to become one of BT’s premier UK broadband partners.
If you could be anyone else for a week, who would you be? David Cameron, so I could either fire George Osborne or force him to do some straight talking to the banks and start putting real investment into the UK’s SMBs and get the real engine of the economy running again.
What will next year’s most overhyped industry buzzword be? 4G – it won’t be a smooth roll-out and it won’t deliver everything. Broadband and Wi-Fi will remain the key technologies for SMB connectivity and development of mobility, VoIP, virtual working and cloud services.
Has 2012 been a good, bad or ugly year? Mostly ugly in terms of the state of the economy, pretty bad in terms of business for most channel companies but with quite a good number of exceptions. Recessions are sometimes good because they clean out the cowboys and the cruisers who are not really putting anything back in. The strong, the dedicated, the innovative, the creative – they come through it. There is some gain from the pain – as long as it does not go on too long.
What would you have as your last meal? Bangers and mash and a pint of good English ale.
What keeps you awake at night? That putt I missed on the 18th to win the round (and the bet!)
What piece of technology could you not be without? All of it – mobile technology is pure magic, broadband and Wi-Fi indispensible to us all in our business and personal lives. You can never go back – a lot of people in our business now can’t remember what it was like without mobile technology; I can and I would never want to go back.
Have any of your predictions come true this year? Yes, that it would get worse before it got better – and that the cloud would NOT take off (or at least not in the exponential way that the analysts said it would).
What is the best partner/customer trip you have ever been on? We had a fantastic trip on Concorde once, courtesy of Compaq I think, which was just a flight to nowhere out at the speed of sound then back again to Heathrow fuelled on champagne and canapés all the way round. I had a good day at Silverstone for the British Grand Prix one year as well. Anything else like that going, I’ll be there.
What do you see as the channel’s biggest challenge in 2013? Same as it has always been – finding a way to make money. Our industry has always been the same; it changes and mutates but SMBs, corporates and the public sector still need solutions that can help them do a better job and these days, keep pace with the consumer. There will always be a role for the real sellers who embrace new technology, form genuine partnerships and take sensible propositions to market.
