AI, cyber and cloud: Inside Sota’s investment plans under new CEO

Ben Smoker reveals how Sota is modernising its service stack and datacentres with a renewed focus on automation, sustainability, and specialist talent

After nearly 12 years with the business, new Sota CEO Ben Smoker is shaking up the MSP’s approach to innovation with a focus on AI, cyber, and sustainable growth.

Having identified its growth areas with the most potential - AI and cyber - Smoker lays out his strategy to reach £22m turnover by 2030.

“We're going to be investing heavily in the coming months around agentic AI, coming up with ways to productise that into a managed service.

“And that isn't just about making money. That's about enabling our customers, going in on a consultancy basis to look at what applications are they using? Where's the inefficiencies? Where can we introduce automation?”

Despite healthy recurring revenue and consistent growth, Smoker admits Sota has underinvested in both sales and product development.

“That has all gone alongside very little investment in sales and marketing.

“Now I'm trying to flip that on its head to make us more sales enabled while retaining everything we did before.

“So we still do right by the customer, but we're going to invest more in sales and marketing, so we can get that message out there.”

This includes a fresh push into underserved areas such as cloud, cyber, and automation.

“Where we haven’t invested is in the product space.

“Because we've had the luxury of such an established product base, we haven't had to go out there and develop it. So we've got to the point now where the two emerging areas in our industry, in AI, automation and cyber, they're the areas that we've overlooked.

That means Sota is gearing up for a hiring spree.

“To build up our capability, we're going to need better people.

“We've always retained good people. But Sota is like the ultimate generalist. Some MSPs specialise in a sector, whereas we go across them all.

“That's a really hard space to operate, because you have to be all things to all people.

“Because we're the ultimate generalist, what we lack against other MSPs that do specialise is those industry or product specialists.

“So what we're going to be heavily invested in is bringing in a cloud specialist at consultant level for example.”

Cloud evolution and sustainability

Sota operates its own private cloud platform, with offerings built on both Hyper-V and VMware. But the current market environment is forcing a rethink.

“Obviously, everyone knows what's going on in the market, and Broadcom has ripped everything up. So people are moving away from VMware in their droves.

“We're not immune to that. We're not a big enough player in the market to be unaffected. So we're considering our options.”

To mitigate these harmful effects, Sota is “upping its game” in the cloud platform space, with multi-tiered offerings.

Sota is also putting its green ambitions into action.

“We need to make sure that in the future we're providing great service and we're doing it sustainably.

“So we'll be investing in solar on the roof of one of our datacentres, and we've moved our fleet to all EV vehicles.

“And we're probably going to build out our capability in one of our datacentres to allow potentially a future NOC (network operations centre) and SOC (security operations centre) in the datacentre.”