Martin Hellawell says reseller will aim to add £70m to top line every year as he talks to CRN about Softcat's first year as a public company and growth plans
'Cloud, cloud, cloud' seems to be the message at every industry or vendor conference these days. To what extent is Softcat embracing cloud and do you feel it is being overhyped?
I do think it is overhyped but I think it's very real and, yes, we are absolutely in that world. We've been in that world since before the word 'cloud' existed. Mimecast is one of the best examples of cloud-based applications we have been selling for many years and we have been its partner of the year for the past nine years. We are the largest Office 365 reseller in the SMB market and we are the largest Azure reseller, so we are doing an awful lot in that cloud market. We've built our own private cloud and have datacentres in Manchester and London and a 24/7 NOC operating those operations. We sell AWS as well. So we are very much in that world and we believe in that world.
I think it's a lot more complex than people thought a few years ago and it complicates IT further. Most people won't be able to move their workloads into the public cloud, so it is going to be a hybrid environment, which means we may have to look after on-premise IT, private cloud IT and public cloud IT. The mid-market customers in particular need a lot of handholding and guidance through that complicated world and that's where we are positioning ourselves. We are ideally placed to benefit from that world but there are certainly threats in it as well, and we're taking that seriously.
People are starting to talk about 'unclouding'. We're hearing more examples of firms rejecting the economics of public cloud and moving back on-premise. Are you seeing that?
Absolutely. I can't give you a name, but last night we had a good customer win who's done just that. They moved into the cloud a few years ago but realised it is far too expensive for them and that they've lost control of their IT, so they're going back on-premise - actually a shared services-type environment. I think we will see more of that. We are a direct benefactor of the infrastructure they will be procuring and implementing to do that. And that's not the first one; we've seen a few of those recently.
Click through to the next stage to find out why Softcat is considering its first ever acquisition and why Hellawell thinks the firm is 'boring'
