Fusing telecoms and IT the way forward - Sir Peter Rigby

Move to focus on cloud would have been tougher if SCC were publicly owned, founder tells CRN as he sets out growth plans

The fusion of IT and telecoms represents where SCC's future lies, its founder Sir Peter Rigby said as he set out his growth plans for the the privately held reseller and integrator.

Rigby founded SCC in 1975 after he saved £2,000 and the Birmingham-headquartered company has grown to become an IT services company which operates across the UK, France and Germany and claims to have 2,500 customers. For its fiscal 2015 SCC recorded revenues of £662m in the UK, making it the second-biggest British reseller and integrator.

Rigby told CRN that his aspirations are for much more expansion, saying he wants to see SCC double in size in five years.

"I don't think it's just a question of size, it's a question of quality and reward," he said. "We are comfortable in the strategy we have and our strategy for the next five years will be to more than double the size of the business and we are on that path.

"That's a doubling of revenues but it's probably more than a doubling of profit," he said. "There are elements of our industry that are tough to make a sensible profit in, and there are areas where it's easier. All our acquisitions are in incremental business opportunities; it's not more of the same. The organic growth we can generate in SCC is there, and that's our future."

SCC has remained privately owned by Rigby Group, which also has ventures in hotels, airports, aviation, property and finance. But some of the top UK resellers have changed their ownership in recent times, with Softcat filing for an IPO in October and Kelway having been acquired by US firm CDW last August.

However, Rigby said he is "reluctant" to change SCC's private status.

"We [have] always remained in family ownership," he said. "We are not dictated to by a VC who wants a quick exit or a public company that would inevitably be driven by quarterly results and share price. We have invested in the long term and that long term has meant building a business over a 20-year period which we would be reluctant to give up."

He added that SCC's move to focus on the cloud would have been difficult if it was in public hands.

"There is a real continuity of management and personnel in an industry that does swap and change a lot," he said. "We have long-term relationships with customers and we take a long-term view. We have as a group made 15 or 16 acquisitions in the past two years, invested many tens of millions in our datacentre activities and in the creation of our secure cloud platform and in the physical datacentre - [we] probably put £50m into that.

Public companies would have difficulty in making those long-term investments because they want things to go to the bottom line and they want to distribute profits

In 2015, SCC made investments in connectivity specialist Fluidata, hosted voice outfit SIPCOM and acquired a controlling stake in mobile voice player One Point. Rigby said the convergence of IT and telecoms is where the future lies for SCC.

"We don't really see ourselves as a channel player these days," he said. "Our business is so much broader than that. Distributing products is just one facet of what we do. We are an entirely services-orientated business with our datacentre activities and cloud services and all the current technologies. We recently acquired three telecoms-related businesses and we see the fusion of telecoms and IT as very much the way forward."