Kcom MD opens up over restructure

Stephen Long says firm will focus more effort on multi-year managed services contracts

Kcom will increasingly turn its back on deals where it is providing only basic connectivity services, its managing director told CRN.

The integrator last week confirmed that 80 roles will be affected by a restructuring drive designed to retune the business away from volume-based activities and towards multi-year managed services deals.

Talking to CRN, managing director Stephen Long (pictured) said Kcom is finding a niche as a "smaller services integrator" providing annuity services to large organisations such as HMRC, for which it recently provided a Cisco-hosted contact centre solution.

"If you are selling a cloud-based contact platform to HMRC, you need a business-led, consultative approach for that. And that's a very different activity than sitting on the phone waiting for someone to order a circuit from you," he said.

Affected staff were briefed last Tuesday, Long confirmed, with cuts occurring across the business, which is part of Hull-based KCOM Group.

"It's a horrible time and we are making sure we treat all the staff affected with discretion, respect and professionalism. But we have too much resource in some areas and over time we will find we have too little in others."

Kcom's lighthouse contract with HMRC was held up in a public accounts committee two weeks ago as an example of how the public sector can benefit from working with smaller, more agile IT suppliers.

Speaking during the session, HMRC chief digital and informational officer Mark Dearnley said working with Kcom is enabling it to increase staff satisfaction and roll out secure messaging and online chat facilities to its contact centre advisers.

This is exactly the type of multi-year deal Kcom will look to snag more of and Long said the firm is investing in areas such as public, private and hybrid cloud, as well as identity and access management, to achieve this.

"We have some skills for the world we are moving into – but we need more," he said. "With the network and applications coming together, suddenly we have the ability to do data analytics on voice and data: those are the sort of areas we will be moving the business into."

Long added: "As the government seeks alternative ways to procure IT services, they will be looking to smaller, more agile companies like us more and more."

In 2012, KCom was awarded a place on the PSN Connectivity framework but Long indicated his firm would now be picking its battles on this front carefully.

"They are very basic connectivity contracts which can be a lot in terms of revenue, but you need scale to hit the price points. BT has the scale and there are areas where we will choose to compete," he said. "But for us it is much more beneficial and profitable to look at deals where customers look to have more than just basic connectivity in the marketplace."