Altinet to open Scottish base

Leeds-based reseller also wants to move more into managed services in 2016

Reseller Altinet is set to open a Scottish base with a new office in central Glasgow in January 2016.

Daniel Bailey, director of the Leeds-based firm, said the decision to open an office in Scotland was because this region was often "overlooked" by the channel.

"If you open up a London office, there is tonnes of competition," he said. "There is such a shortage of quality IT consultancy relationships in Scotland. Normally Scottish customers tend to be more proactive in going out and seeking products, rather than having the business development guys go to them."

Altinet will take on four new staff at the new Glasgow office, to add to its current headcount of about 20.

The new office comes at a time when the Pure Storage and Barracuda partner is adding managed services to its customer offering, Bailey added.

"I'm going to be spending a lot of my time up there [in Scotland]," he said. "And one of the things I will be doing in early 2016 is speaking to a lot of our customers to understand a lot more about how we can help them more in 2016. And I think managed services is going to be a really key message."

He said the move to managed services came because more and more customers are changing their attitudes to the cloud and beginning to transition off-premise, particularly with Microsoft's Office 365.

Altinet's managed services offering will be around cloud-based email security, as a service.

"It's an extra offering and we are still going to be selling products," he said. "I don't think people are only going to be interested in cloud email security overnight, but it shows Altinet's ability to respond to the market."