Up all night

Dimension Data's UK managing director Calvin Goom says the war for skilled IT staff is keeping him awake at night as he presses on with his ambitious growth plans

As he outlined his plans to crack the public sector, reshape his business for the cloud era and help his parent company in its goal to double revenue, Dimension Data UK managing director Calvin Goom admitted there is only one thing that has him in a cold sweat after dark.

"One of the biggest challenges I face in the UK - as I'm sure a lot of my peers do around the world - is the war for talent and trying to get hold of good-quality, capable, experienced individuals with the right cultural alignment and work ethic in our industry, especially considering the changes we are going through," Goom told CRN.

"It's the only thing that keeps me awake at night as chief executive of this business."

Johannesburg-headquartered Cisco Gold partner Didata is going through more changes than most after chief executive Brett Dawson two years ago unveiled ambitious plans to double its global revenues to $12bn (£7.9bn) by 2018.

The first major step in that strategy was last year's acquisition of pan-European comms VAR NextiraOne, which handed Didata 1,850 more permanent staff and new vendor relationships with Avaya and Genesys.

In the UK, the integration of NextiraOne was completed from a legal standpoint on 1 October. As well as adding 175 staff in the UK and Ireland, NextiraOne gifted Didata a first-time presence in the UK public sector, which will be one of two "big bets" for the firm's UK operations in its fiscal year starting 1 October, Goom revealed.

Public sector push

"We have been working hard during financial year 2015 to make sure we are on all the relevant frameworks," Goom said, listing Didata's successful placement on the JANET, Infrastructure Services and Network Services frameworks as evidence. It is also bidding for G-Cloud 7.

With offices in 58 countries, NTT-owned Didata is no SME, but Goom said his firm fits snugly into a niche between the global giants that were habitually tongue-lashed by Francis Maude in the last parliament and the SME suppliers the government is seeking to court.

"A lot of SMEs are struggling when it comes to contracting with the public sector and do not have the balance sheet to protect the liabilities the government procurement folk are looking to have," Goom said. "So we feel we are incredibly well placed. We are not as big as the IBMs, Fujitsus and HPs of this world but we are a lot bigger than the SME community, so we have a strong balance sheet, strong infrastructure and capabilities, and are a new entrant without the legacy reputational issues in that market."

Didata's UK cloud architecture this month got the nod on ISO 27001, 27018 and CSA STAR, which Goom billed as the three certifications needed to make a good fist of the public sector cloud market.

"We are very well placed to start taking our cloud story to the UK public sector, where companies such as Skyscape have done well to date," he said.

"We had a legacy contract with one of the nation's largest blue-light entities and that is now being extended across some other central government departments. Now with the cloud proposition we can also take to market, some conversations I've been having with some senior civil servants suggest we have a place to play."

Didata's other big bet for 2016, on end-user computing, will see it create a sales overlay function around a new cloud-based enterprise mobility offering it is launching, Goom revealed.

"A lot of companies are struggling because employees are bringing smartphones into the office. When, suddenly, corporate data becomes available on a device like this, how do you protect and manage it? We think it's a killer app as a cloud service."

Didata's growth ambitions are predicated on its desire to cater for the rise in cloud computing and consumptive, opex-based models, Goom explained. It now has 16 datacentres around the world.

Its goal is also to act as a "Band-Aid" for US-listed manufacturers wanting to respond to rising demand for cloud without upsetting Wall Street, Neil Campbell, security business group general manager, said.

"For them to make a change from booking the entirety of a one- or multi-year deal on the day they sell it, to having to eke that out over the life of the technology, that has a massive impact on their profit and loss and apparent standing on the NASDAQ," Campbell explained.

"They need to do a lot of financial re-engineering and explaining to survive that transition to a more consumptive-based model, so it is organisations such as ours that are helping them in the interim to be able to deliver that model to their clients without having to re-architect their financial models... yet."

Didata's new alliance with EMC and its shifting relationship with Microsoft, with which it holds LSP status, are two good examples of this, said Goom.

"Everything we are doing now with Microsoft isn't about selling licences but how their clients are consuming [their software]," he said. "The entire compensation plan, the entire dashboard and client scorecard between our two organisations is having to shift as we develop cloud-based consumption models for Microsoft technology without having to sell any licences."

Can't get the staff

Dawson said in 2013 that Didata's growth would be driven by both organic and acquisitive growth, and Goom conceded that manpower was a big factor behind the NextiraOne acquisition.

"I can't get enough [staff] and finding them is really hard. So the acquisition process does help us get access to talent, which is a really important part of our strategy," Goom explained.

"I was recently asked what I would do if I were prime minister, and my answer was that I would make computer science compulsory at primary school and GSCE, as a way of encouraging more people to learn more about IT, rather than just messing about on their PlayStation or smartphone. It's endemic; the number of people taking STEM subjects in higher education has been going backwards since the internet bubble burst in 2001."

According to The Tech Partnership, the number of skilled UK workers needed to embark on tech careers has risen to 134,000 annually.

That said, Goom reflected on whether the industry will become less "people dependent" as it evolves.

"The transformational journey the industry is going on means there is less dependency on headcount," he said. "The more I deliver through a consumptive model, the more it is about shared services remotely delivered, therefore the level of warm-body intervention required is reduced, because you are building automation into your processes.

He concluded: "I don't think people understand the implications the Internet of Things could have. Everyone used to talk about B2C and B2B - well, I'm starting to talk about ‘B2T'. My business value is not just about how I deliver value to a client or person in a client, but about the device that client is using and that will get the industry thinking about how you can radically change a process and make it more effective and less people-dependent."