Computacenter wants to be known as a digital services enabler

UK giant opens up to CRN about its next phase and insists it has not forgotten its traditional reselling roots

Computacenter has told CRN it wants to be known as a "digital services enabler" as it sets out its future strategy, but insists its reseller and systems integrator roots have not been forgotten.

Speaking to CRN, Computacenter's solutions director Pierre Hall said that his company has undergone a number of significant transformations in its lifetime – a process which is speeding up. He said the company's next guise will be all about digital technology.

"A couple of years ago, when we were looking at our financial and operating plan, we were looking at tilting the organisation slightly in terms of its mission and ambition, from identifying ourselves as a broad-brush systems integrator and [we were] coming up with a mission around enabling users and their business, particularly in the digital world," he told CRN.

"If you know much about Computacenter, you know evolution is in our DNA. We've grown up from being a 1980s reseller, right through to value-add in the 90s, systems integrator, a service provider at the turn of the century, to fully managed services provider now. Our ambition is to become a digital services enabler for our customers. As we see the shift to digital – it is the word of the day in terms of the marketing you see from competitors, and within the industry – but how we underpin those strategies for our customers is a big focus for us."

Although the company is keen to keep up with the times, its traditional reselling business has not been forgotten, he said.

"I've got a diagram that we use internally about our history and the one thing we do know is that the pace of change is coming a lot faster," he said. "Historically, we could talk about Computacenter's history in terms of decades. I think it is fair to say we have been classically seen as both a large value-added reseller, and then a SI, and a managed services provider.

"It's not like we stopped – we started off as a reseller and we're still Europe's largest reseller; we are not stopping reselling. We continue to do those things and layer on top. It's an important point. This digital services enablement is the next phase of that evolution."

Last month, Computacenter's group services boss Steve Rayner told CRN about the importance of developing IP, such as its Next-Generation Service Desk (NGSD), is to the company.

Hall told CRN that despite Computacenter's size, it still manages to work in the fast-moving way that smaller competitors, such as so-called Born in the Cloud resellers, do.

"If you look at NGSD and what we did around that, we took an agile start-up approach," he said. "We created a hot-house facility which was a three-day event involving 150 people in a gamified way. We look at those companies and processes and try and adopt them ourselves with our IP development. We recently held something called a 'digithon'. We took a lot of experts out of the business and got them to a two-day event.

"We're looking at following some of those Born in the Cloud providers and digital innovative companies and trying to drive some of that behaviour back into Computacenter."

He added that aside from taking inspiration from emerging companies, Computacenter often works with them.

"If you think about our reseller background, it's a partner model," he said. "One of the challenges of being a start-up is not having a large sales force or a channel reach, so some of our infrastructure allows us to help them with that. Our aspiration is to partner where we don't have those capabilities ourselves. I think it's enriching for the customer to see this type of thing."