‘Our sweet spot is in the mid-market’: Six Degrees CEO

Vince DeLuca talks revenue targets, partner relationships, and the MSP’s five tech pillars

London-based MSP Six Degrees wants to be at the centre of the mid-market.

To do so, the company needs to adapt to an everchanging tech scene, which requires consolidation of its core focus while exploring new tech IT horizons.

This is the challenge CEO Vince DeLuca chose to take on when becoming the head of the organisation in June 2024.

In an interview with CRN, DeLuca goes through the challenges the company faces in the market, its relationship with its competitors, and his ambitions moving forward.

To generate profit, Six Degrees has found its “sweet spot” - the mid-market.

DeLuca describes the ecosystem’s partner-first mentality, collaborative ethic, and large budgets as part of the reciprocal attraction.

He explains that a smaller market would not align with the company’s price points, and that the level of sophistication offered by Six Degrees does not align with their needs.

“That’s a generality; there are certainly small clients that are quite sophisticated.”

When it comes to large enterprises, the CEO doesn’t necessarily want to compete against some of the “formidable” players in that space.

But while the company doesn’t go to market in a vertical sense, it counts clients in a few verticals such as public sector, finance, retail, manufacture, and legal-type services.

Six Degrees’ customers are all based in the UK.

“We don’t have any major international expansion plans at the moment.

“We think there’s quite a bit of opportunity here in the UK, and we’ll continue to focus on the country’s market.”

Vendors and distributors

In the UK, the company partners with vendors such as Illumio, Fortinet, Microsoft (particularly around Sentinel).

“While we’re anchored in Microsoft, we do branch out where needed to extend those capabilities and deepen our approach to zero trust,” says the CEO.

The group also works with a multitude of disties such as Arrow, and more recently Northamber.

“Northamber is an interesting one for us,” DeLuca says.

“They significantly extend our reach - almost exponentially.

“We’ve developed a strong co-selling and co-planning relationship with them, especially around identifying white space and new opportunities in the market.”

He tells CRN that distribution is a major enabler for the MSP.

“These partnerships give us co-selling opportunities, complementary capabilities, and strong commercial foundations.”

Beyond partnering firms, the Six Degrees can also rely on its nearly 400 employees.

Organic and inorganic development

The PE-backed company, owned by Charlesbank Capital Partners since 2015, sees a lot of M&A opportunities across its desk, even though it is not actively managing an acquisition roster.

DeLuca says he remains open if he identifies an organisation that can help Six Degrees in terms of scale, differentiation, technical capabilities, and if it can attract a unique and interesting customer base.

The firm is currently aiming for 12 to 14 per cent in overall organic development.

“In the macro space, we’re in the 12 to 14 per cent range in overall organic growth.

“Despite the geopolitical uncertainty, we think that’s very doable.”

Broad competitive base

DeLuca also tells CRN he sees a lot of competitors in the mid-market, as many large global integrators have acquired companies that bring them in this space.

Firms without a set of products and capabilities as large as the one Six Degrees offers sometimes have the opportunity to be more specialised in one sector.

“The landscape of competitiveness is multi-dimensional, and pretty much everywhere you look, there’s going to be an element of competitiveness out there.

“Being closest to our customers and really understanding what they need and what drives value into their business is a differentiator for any service company.

“We’re going to really focus on that, because we can get them to understand we are providing a high degree of value.”

Five tech pillars

When joining the MSP, the still freshly appointed leader says he spent the first quarter and a half assessing the needs of the business, understanding where things stand, and identifying how to move forward in a way that aligns with growth objectives.

This allowed him to identify the company’s five pillars, he explains.

The first is communications and connectivity, around which the company was built, with some co-location and other services in the voice and mobile space.

The second pillar is cybersecurity, which developed thanks to its acquisition of CNS Group in 2018.

It now offers professional and managed services across a range of cyber capabilities.

“Cyber underpins almost everything we do.”

The third pillar is cloud.

“If you look back at the company’s heritage, we have a hosted private cloud offering we call enterprise cloud - a multi-tenant platform through which we deliver private cloud services.

“We orchestrate dedicated private cloud environments for customers.

“We’re seeing a strong momentum in public cloud, and today we’re quite deeply aligned with Microsoft and focused on Azure capabilities in that space.

“We’re also evolving toward a more hybrid and multi-cloud approach.”

DeLuca identifies modern work as being the firm’s fourth area of focus.

Six Degrees aims to bring productivity tools and experiences to its end users.

The fifth and last point on which the MSP focuses is AI.

While nascent, DeLuca claims Six Degrees is developing a solid strategy around it.

“Internally, we’re using AI to gain efficiencies, better insight, and more automation.

“Externally, we see AI having relevance across multiple business lines and standing up as its own set of offerings.”

Within its AI approach the company doesn’t necessarily want to solve every solution for every “shiny” object out there but instead wants to build a robust underlying data architecture that can take advantage of the AI tech on top.

“There’s a lot that can be done foundationally to help our clients really get ready for the power of AI being applied to it.

“A lot of it is in that underlying data infrastructure, for lack of a better term, and that’s where our focus is going to be.”