ANS guns for northern supremacy

Manchester-based VAR grows turnover 10 per cent as it looks to become vendors' regional partner of choice

Scott Fletcher: Cisco sees us as its go-to independent partner in the north

ANS claims it is becoming the “go-to” partner in the north for its key vendors after achieving another year of double-digit growth.

Although the Manchester-based Cisco, VMware and NetApp partner failed to match the 20 per cent growth it posted last year – let alone the 64 per cent spike registered the year before – turnover for the year to 31 March still rose 10 per cent to £13.3m.

Operating profit fell from £1.1m to £0.9m, which it attributed to higher costs associated with an investment in staff, systems and its successful Buying Solutions bid that it said would pay off later down the line.

Chief executive Scott Fletcher said ANS is seeing particular momentum around the advanced data centre technologies from Cisco, NetApp and VMWare that form its Infrastructure 3.0 strategy. Recurring revenue grew 36 per cent to £4.9m.

Fletcher claimed that ANS is rising swiftly up the pecking order in the north, comparing his firm’s progress to that of neighbouring Cisco partner Intrinsic Technology – which also recently posted results.

“Cisco sees us as its go-to independent partner in the north. We are getting there with NetApp and starting to compete with [NetApp Star partner] Alpha, " he said.

“We are also in competition with Intrinsic. We are slightly more profitable in percentage terms and I think we have got into a better space with Cisco UCS and virtualisation. We are not as reliant on unified communications.”

Fletcher also insisted the lead time woes that have dogged Cisco’s channel this year were beginning to ease.

“We are seeing 3-4 weeks, even on UCS, which is okay with our project schedules," he said. "We have got to a point where it is not a problem and Cisco is the best partner we have.”

Adam Jarvis, sales director at Intrinsic Technology, claimed his firm worked in a different markets than ANS.

"It has been a while since we competed with ANS, having moved out of the SME marketplace some time ago," he said. "Our focus is around consultancy and professional services, delivering service-led propositions - mostly managed services driving cost optimisation in these challenging times. This approach has led to H1 revenues increasing by 36 per cent, profits up over 100 per cent on the same time last year and our 2010 revenues on target to break the £30m barrier."