Six Degrees to fling cash into channel biz

Virtual private cloud provider says it is in 'investment phase' following ownership change

Six Degrees Group says it is in investment mode following its change of ownership, and has promised to fling some of its spare cash into growing its channel.

The firm, which offers a range of managed comms services including datacentre, co-location, managed hosting, cloud computing and leased lines, changed private equity owners in June and has since made three acquisitions.

Some 40 per cent of Six Degrees' revenues are already generated by partners but group marketing director Campbell Williams said some of the new investment will be used to recruit new resellers.

"We are at the beginning of another private equity cycle so we are very much in the investment phase," he said.

"We're going to be investing an awful lot of money recruiting new heads and one of things we want to do as part of that growth investment is recruiting more channel partners."

Competing with the likes of Redcentric and Pulsant, Six Degrees is able to offer a full cloud, networking and voice proposition to VARs that "don't entirely know what they're doing end-to-end", Williams said.

This includes voice VARs that are grappling with the move to cloud, he explained.

"A customer whose production is sat on Azure may ask ‘can I spin up a few more VMs and run my telephony applications on it too?' - and most voice resellers would just look at them aghast," he said.

"That's our angle. We are looking for partners that have a lot of the skills sets but not all of them."

Six Degrees' current channel partners include Capita, Advanced 365, Adept Telecom, Solo Communications and Dell, for whom it delivers virtual private managed cloud services.

"We are looking to recruit 40 incremental heads and that will be in areas that will add a lot of value to the channel in particular - more pre-sales and product marketing capability," Williams said.

The firm has made two small - and unnamed - bolt-on acquisitions since it snapped up CSG in June - its first purchase for two years.

"That's an indication of the level of ambition there is and that there's money to be spent," Williams said.

"We are looking to recruit 40 incremental heads and that will be in areas that will add a lot of value to the channel in particular - more pre-sales and product marketing capability."