Giacom leaders: ‘We want every pound small businesses spend on technology to go through the channel’
CRN attended Giacom’s Imagine Nation to speak with the distributor’s execs about mobile, M&A roadmap and becoming "the next generation of global technology distribution"
"No presentations, no sales pitches and no formal agenda."
That was Giacom's ethos for this year's edition of Imagine Nation.
The company swapped the traditional channel conference for 1990s club culture, taking over London nightclub fabric with DJs, live music and hundreds of members of its partner community.
But it wasn't just the music that was loud. So are the company's ambitions.
During the event, CRN sat down with Terry O'Brien, CEO, Nathan Marke, chief strategy officer and Darren Spence, cloud MD, to discuss its 6,000-strong partner base, being "a too well-kept secret", AI demand and where the next opportunities lie for the channel.
CRN: What’s the mission behind Imagine Nation and what do you want partners to take away from it?
O’Brien: "Our passion is about creating a sense of community in the UK channel and showing there’s more power in being together.
"We wanted to do something different where we could all come together, have a really good time, build relationships and friendships, meet new people and not have that traditional presenting-to-people event.
"It’s about coming together as a community, having a good time and celebrating the great work we do as a UK channel."
CRN: What does your partner base look like?
Marke: "We’ve got about 6,000 partners in the Giacom community. Broadly speaking, about half come from an IT MSP or IT reseller background. The other half come from telecoms, so UC, mobile and connectivity.
"Of course, the worlds are all converging now. Everyone wants to become a more strategic partner to their customers.
"There’s loads of different DNA and different cultures. It’s often founder-led and entrepreneurial. Everyone’s quite unique. It isn’t one-size-fits-all.
"They’ve all got different aspirations and the challenge is working with 6,000 individual businesses because they are all very individual.
"There are also lots of founders and entrepreneurs here. In their day-to-day lives, it can actually be quite lonely and hard running these businesses because you’re working really hard, you’re isolated and you’re trying to come up with all the ideas.
"When we get this community together, they start to work off each other and you see these connections being made. That’s the power of it. It’s not about pitching. It’s about getting people together."
CRN: Things have been moving quickly in tech. What have you seen driving the most demand among your reseller partners recently?
O'Brien:" All demand ultimately comes from the end-user customers because that’s where the demand is.
"End-user businesses in the UK all want to make the best of technology. Technology continues to innovate and change and it continues to get more complex. They need someone to help them.
"The demand is coming from UK SMBs. Never forget, 60 per cent of UK GDP, the heart of the growth of the UK, need help and they’re searching for somebody who can help. That’s where our partners come in.
"Our partners are constantly trying to become better servants of their customers – broader portfolio, better service, really helping them be the strategic thinker for their technology.
"Our job is to make that dead easy. How can we remove the complexity? How can we make it really easy for our partners to succeed and serve UK SMBs really well?
"They want to grow, they want to use technology to grow and they need help to do it."
Marke: "I’ve just been with 60 or 70 partners at an event this morning. The usual things you would expect – cybersecurity and AI – are really interesting.
"But then you talk to an individual partner who’s a really good MSP. He’s getting loads of growth out of AI, services and security.
"He said, 'My business is going really well at the moment.'
"I said, 'What was the best bit of your business in the last three months?'
"Mobile.
"He said, 'I’ve just nailed three or four big mobile deals. I’ve made a load of money, made a load of cash and I’ve done something dead easy for my customer.'
"You think it’s security and AI but actually it comes down to: what does the customer need?"
O'Brien: "If you think about the most important piece of technology people use in business, what is it? It’s the mobile.
"The channel needs to own the mobile. It absolutely should. It’s a centrepiece of technology for the channel.
"We’re seeing more and more of our MSP partners wanting to really serve their customers in mobile. At the end of the day, customers want you to look after everything."
CRN: Do you see more opportunity in mobile now than before?
O'Brien: "I think the stat is something like 90-plus per cent of the UK SMB market buys its mobiles direct from the network.
"So less than ten per cent buy their mobile, airtime, mobile security, mobile applications - everything to do with mobile - through UK channel partners, who are best placed to serve UK SMBs.
"That’s the opportunity.
"Is mobile growing? No.
"But should the UK channel be taking a massive share of that and looking after mobile for their customers? Absolutely.
"It’s a market share game. Partners have got to own the customer’s mobile."
Spence: "Those end customers don’t want to manage loads of contracts.
"They’ve got their MSP looking after their IT and security. They don’t want that plus their mobile phone provider, plus whoever does their leased lines. They want to run their business.
"They want one main contract with an MSP to look after all their key services and that’s why MSPs are turning to us to help add those other services.
"It simplifies the end customer’s whole supplier engagement process."
CRN: On the hardware side, have you seen the chip shortage changing demand at all, or a rise in demand for refurbished devices?
O'Brien: "I wouldn’t say there’s been a huge spike in demand but there’s a general sense of people wanting to do the right thing when it comes to hardware.
"It’s about making sure they’re getting the most out of the hardware they buy and, when they replace it, doing the right thing with the old hardware – getting it refreshed or getting it to somebody else who can take value from it.
"I wouldn’t say there’s been this massive shift yet.
"We’ve recently launched a campaign called The Big Green Goal, where we help our partners and customers take all that old hardware that’s sat in “rooms of doom” doing nothing.
"We take it away, audit it, cleanse it, refurbish it and resell it if need be. We can break it apart and use the parts for good and then use the money created from that for a social purpose, which is our Big Goal.
"Our Big Goal is about how we, as a community, help young adults who are homeless, need a helping hand or have taken a wrong turn. It’s about helping them get off the street, back into gainful employment and get their lives back on track.
"We’re trying to get the UK channel behind this en masse. It deals with an environmental challenge while also creating social good.
"There’s more to do in that space but I think it takes an initiative where it’s not just, 'Give us your old hardware and we’ll make some money out of it", it’s: “Do the right thing with this stuff and let’s create social value from it.”
CRN: So it goes beyond just the financial opportunity?
Marke: "I think the channel really wants to do the right thing.
"We’ve done loads of research about what endears a partner to an SMB. SMBs want to buy from local companies but they also want to buy from local companies that support initiatives they care about.
"Increasingly, that sort of thing is on the agenda of SMBs. It matters. It’s not just about being great at service or being great at your core offering. It’s about doing the right thing.
"Fundamentally, I think business owners in our channel want to do that.
"The Big Goal stat I loved was that we’ve now helped 1,000 young people out of homelessness and into gainful work, getting their lives back on track. We’re hoping to double in size."
O'Brien: "If anybody reading this wants to know more about the Big Goal and what we’re doing with The Big Green Goal, we’re trying to create a sense of togetherness and community to make a bigger difference by doing it together.
"If anybody wants to play a part and be part of that movement, give us a shout.
"It’s about asking, as an industry, how do we solve this problem?
"We had more than 65 partners involved last year. It’ll be 100 partners this year. It should be 1,000.
"It shows an industry coming together to do the right thing, whether that’s for environmental purposes or to make a social difference."
CRN: What are you seeing driving demand for cloud at the moment?
Spence: "AI definitely is one of those.
"People are trying to see how they can use AI to streamline their businesses and make their customers more efficient. That’s the big one.
"There’s obviously a level of security that goes with that. It’s about how they classify and govern their data.
"To get the most out of AI, you really need to understand where your data is and put those guardrails around it.
"As soon as customers venture down that road, there’s a big conversation about adoption - making sure they adopt it correctly, how they secure it and how they deploy it correctly.
"That’s driving a lot of demand for our security portfolio, our adoption services, commercial services and our Azure business."
O'Brien: "I don’t think everyone today understands Giacom’s uniqueness.
"We are this one place where you can get access to cloud services, security services, mobile services and connectivity services, all from best-of-breed providers, from one place and at scale.
"I still think we’re a bit of a too well-kept secret."
CRN: Your last acquisition was Inform Billing in 2024. Should we expect further acquisitions moving forward?
O'Brien:" Yes, we’d hope so.
"We would buy businesses for scale. We’d buy businesses to bring us a broader portfolio – product breadth. We might even buy businesses to give us a different footprint internationally.
"They’re probably the areas where we’ll focus.
"Can we get better scale to bring value? Can we get a broader portfolio to bring breadth? Or can we bring reach?
"Do we want to acquire? Of course we do, because we want Giacom to be the best scale provider to the UK channel."
Marke: "We also want the right businesses and actually, it’s not a target-rich environment because there aren’t that many really good wholesale businesses out there.
"There are loads of partners, loads of people serving the end customer but there aren’t that many companies that would fit well with our wholesale model."
O'Brien: "Giacom can be the next generation of global technology distribution."
CRN: If we spoke again a year from now, what would you like to be able to tell me you had achieved?
Marke: "We want every pound that small businesses spend on technology to go through the channel. Today, it doesn’t.
"In telco, around 30 per cent of the market goes through the channel. In IT services, it’s more like 90 per cent because it’s already a very mature channel model.
"That shift to subscription services from on-premise services and from vendors selling direct, retailers and other routes to market towards the channel, is the mission.
"In 12 months’ time, we want to have pushed the market. If we do that right, we’ll beat the market, we’ll grow faster, our partners will grow faster and they’ll get more profitable.
"That’s where we’re going."