Dell EMC VAR Reciprocal talks up new spin-off MSP LifeCycleStor

LifeCycleStor has been trading for six months and is on track to make over £1.1m by the end of the year

Reciprocal's co-founders say they have "everything covered within the IT life cycle" with the addition of their new MSP LifeCycleStor.

Aiming to make £1.1m revenues in its first year, LifeCycleStor focuses on maintenance support, using solutions from vendors including Dell EMC, HP, NetApp, Cisco, and IBM to support projects from implementation to completion.

LifeCycleStor is part of the Reciprocal Group. The group also comprises VAR Reciprocal, which works with vendors including Dell EMC, Cisco and VMware to provide services and solutions; eDave, which provides maintenance support for products; and NESessor, the group's own IP which scans customer systems, analysing the files to advise on performance and cost saving.

Andrew James, director and co-founder of Reciprocal and LifeCycleStor, explained: "The LifeCycleStor delivery is helping customers re-evaluate their current infrastructure, as well as looking at how they can maintain support throughout the life cycle of a project. We will put the new infrastructure in place, we will maintain the old infrastructure and we will deliver the project from implementation to migration right through to completion."

"We have everything covered within the IT life cycle"

Sarah Lellow (pictured above), director and co-founder of Reciprocal and LifeCycleStor, added: "We are promoting both [Reciprocal and LifeCycleStor] together. LifeCycleStor is more on its own because it appeals to separate customers. But with Reciprocal, LifeCycleStor is part of that because it is telling the whole story from assessing data, migrating, architecting the solution, delivering the solution and protecting their old kit while they are delivering the solution. We have everything covered within the IT life cycle."

LifeCycleStor was founded in November 2015 and started trading six months ago.

"We didn't trade on LifeCycleStor until we dotted the I's and crossed the T's. We wanted to make sure we could do it absolutely right and make sure we can do what we say on the tin," said Lellow.

"We've predicted £1.1m revenues for this first year. It is a completely different turnover to Reciprocal. The value of each contract we take on is a lot less than with Reciprocal, as it is a completely different pricing model."

LifeCycleStor has seen a surge of new customers recently including the NHS, financial companies and organisations in the education space, said Lellow.

"Because Reciprocal is well known for its services, they like that and it gives us the confidence and edge to take on new customers," she added.

Lellow and James said that Reciprocal was on track to reach £6m revenues this year, with the goal of reaching £10m revenues in the next two years.

Lellow said: "We've done well this year. I've set a target for this year of £6m, which I'm hoping we will go over. But you can't be sure until the end of the year. The forecasts are good. Within the next 24 months we are absolutely hoping for, and I can't see any reason why we wouldn't reach, £10m."

Tony Lock (pictured right), distinguished analyst at Freeform Dynamics, said that the maintenance support market is continuously growing as IT becomes more integral to the way businesses run.

"It's a market that, as long as they can get their pricing right, can be very attractive. Organisations have always found it difficult to deal with routine maintenance. Maintenance tends to be more break and fix than strategic maintenance. So the opportunities for the channel to add more value to that side of things is clear. But the important thing is price, because the customers will not want to pay much more than on their standard maintenance contracts with suppliers. So the channel is going to have to educate those customers on the value they add on top of those contracts. It will have to do a bit of work explaining the value to people;, what the benefits are to the end customer," he said.

"All our research indicates that business is absolutely dependent on IT and it expects more and more IT services to run 24/7. That means core infrastructure and maintenance is absolutely essential. So there is a lot of awareness that IT has to keep running. The opportunity to provide value-add services which would reduce incidents is clear. But it is a question of education. Businesses need IT and they need IT more and more every day, so there is a need for people to keep the IT running."