IBM whizzkid Portal in strategy overhaul

Big Blue software VAR looking to become less tech-led

IBM's largest UK boutique software reseller, Portal, is looking to shed its techie image and get more strategic with customers.

New Portal managing director Jon Bradshaw has spent the first five months of his tenure looking at how the firm can "package up the areas we are great at" and tailor its proposition to various industry verticals, including higher education.

"Customers buy our depth of expertise, and that's not very strategic," Bradshaw (pictured) said.

"If IBM has got something going, we become specialists in it and a customer will call us on the back of IBM's coat-tails. I want to step out of that and into identifying and solving problems that industries haven't actually identified yet."

For example, Portal is now helping universities minimise lost tuition fees associated with student attrition. Bradshaw said most universities had accepted the lost revenue as a fact of life since the tuition fee hike.

"Universities had been putting up with this for years and we're saying to them, ‘no, this doesn't have to happen'," he explained. "If they're losing £2.5m a year in lost student tuition fees, I tell them I want 20 per cent of that and that's what you pay me based only on success."

Portal's Exceptional Student Experience solution – all built on digital marketing, advanced analytics and social collaboration tools from IBM – is designed to help universities attract and retain the right students and keep them engaged as alumni.

"You can see how we could adapt this to become an ‘exceptional customer experience' and take it out into transport/distribution, travel or airlines," Bradshaw said. "It would be the same model of attracting the right people to your website, not having them drop out and becoming loss customers through to engaging them in social communities."

He added: "We've been a boutique IT consultancy but we want to move from being more tech-led to being industry solution and strategy-led."

Portal was formed in 2006 through the merger of four IBM software partners. With 80 staff, including 30 in India, Portal now claims to be IBM's fourth-largest UK software partner behind SCC, Computacenter and Softcat.

Bradshaw said Portal now acts as a supplier to many of the larger VARs – including Softcat and Bytes – through its OneSource division, which was formed two years ago.

"It's for all the resellers that don't want to hold all the IBM accreditations," he explained.