Kelway snaps at Computacenter's heels

Aggressive VAR talks battleplans

Kelway is eyeing the top-three technology provider spot in the UK and is breathing hard on the heels of rivals Computacenter and SCC.

The London-based firm has recently moved to new offices in the City and is pursuing an aggressive £300m turnover goal.

Dan Laws, managing director of the firm, said its recent acquisition of ISC Computers has given Kelway a boost in the cloud services space, and he said the firm has aggressive growth plans, likely to break through the £60m organic growth barrier for its coming financial results.

"More than 20 per cent of our revenue will be through services this year," Laws said. "And 40 per cent of our gross margin will be through services."

"There is an outdated view of our business as a box-shifter, but that is not the case. Our product business is going so well that we have to sell even more service going forward to compensate," Laws added.

"Investing in our cloud infrastructure allows us to deliver cloud direct to our customers and by Q1 next year the business will be all guns blazing at almost every level to compete with Computacenter," he said.

Laws said Kelway is being noticed by larger customers.

"As our business grows, our attractiveness to larger customers has grown," he said. "There are a finite number of businesses that we compete with now, but when we were a £50m player, we were competing against every man and his dog."

The firm is also rapidly growing its international business, Laws claimed, recently opening a service desk in Dubai and growing its presence in emerging markets such as Singapore and Hong Kong.

Kelway is well prepared for the booming cloud services market, Laws said.

"The word services is as important as the word cloud," he said. "The reality for businesses such as ours is do we compete with Amazon, selling virtual machines at $4? Or if a customer wants to buy the cheapest desktop do we compete with the direct vendors? No. The services wrap around where the opportunity is, and customers migrating to a managed services environment are presenting significant opportunity for our business."

Kelway has three options in the cloud, he explained. Firstly do we just sell services that help people migrate to other platforms, secondly do we form relationships with the people that already do that and thirdly do we build our own offerings?

"I am planning to do a little bit of all three," he said. "We have the skills and abilities to invest where a lot of our competitors do not. In terms of the cloud I don't see it as massively different to what we do now."

Phil Doye, chief executive of Kelway (pictured), added the fact that the company has recently appointed a chief technology officer (CTO) in the past week - Andy Eccles - was testament to Kelway's technological plans.

"I don't know many firms in our position that have their own CTO," he said, adding that as well as developing its technological offerings the firm will keep an eye on potential acquisition targets.

"We will keep watching the market and remain up for any acquisitions that would help us take the business where we want it to go," Doye added.

But despite the services aspirations, Laws said it was important not to forget the company's roots.

"We are not embarrassed to be a reseller because we are good at it. As we continue to do that we want to talk to our customers about how we can help them deliver an IT strategy in the broader sense. I feel very bullish about our strategy and ability to execute on it and I want our competitors to be fearful," he warned.