Ambitious VAR Principal looking to treble IT arm in SME cloud push

Digital marketing and switching small customers to the cloud key priorities

Reseller Principal is looking to treble the size of its IT arm within three years as it encourages more and more SME customers towards the cloud.

The Horsham-headquartered reseller has nine other offices across the UK and currently turns over about £25m annually. The firm started off as a print specialist, moving into IT in the late 90s, then focusing on cloud three years ago. Its IT arm accounts for only about 10 per cent of its business at the moment, but the firm hopes sales in the unit will triple in the coming three years.

The boost, it hopes, will come from smaller customers moving to the cloud - something it admits some have been reluctant to do in the past. To help in this effort, it is launching a focused campaign for its smaller customers about cloud - echoing the cloud message from Microsoft, one of its most strategic partners.

Roger Wood, Principal's IT sales manager, is behind the SME push, and said many smaller firms have been wary until now.

"It differs from situation to situation and from person to person," he said. "Many fear it is too new… and some are petrified of the security issues. I'm speaking to you from Kent - the Garden of England - and communications aren't much cop in some locations here. It doesn't matter how good your cloud is, if you can't get to it, it's no good. So for geographical reasons, some can't use the cloud. But they are becoming fewer and fewer and we are winning the war. More often than not, the feedback is 'I wish we had done this years ago'."

Tony Wills, Principal's commercial and marketing director, said that his firm can practice what it preaches now that is has moved itself to the cloud.

Microsoft has been talking up the cloud for the last few years, encouraging and incentivising its partners to use the technology to set the best example to customers. Wills said this has been an important growth driver for the firm. He the company's future growth will be organic, but also potentially from acquisition. A partner in the Microsoft space, aligned to similar goals, would be an ideal candidate, but others with UC specialisms would also be a good fit, Wills said.

Making some noise

Another key focus for growth at the company is boosting its digital footprint. Microsoft has been talking about digital marketing for a number of years now, encouraging partners to use videos and social media to get their message out there.

This, Wills said, strongly resonates with his firm.

"We are conscious of the fact that the way you go to market these days has changed dramatically," he said. "You could secure business through a telemarketing and door-knocking campaign [in the past]. Now we are in the process of redesigning our marketing approach - from the website to touch points on social media. We've had a complete re-emphasis on marketing and our go-to-market."

Principal hopes that its renewed digital marketing approach will help its efforts in encouraging SMEs to move towards the cloud.

Bell said many smaller firms are not necessarily aware they are already using cloud in some form, and just need to make the leap to make a bigger investment.

Ian Moyse, cloud expert and board member of Eurocloud and the Cloud Industry Forum, agreed that many SMEs don't know how advanced they are on their cloud journeys.

"Smaller businesses are likely using cloud, but often don't realise it," he said. "It may be Dropbox, Office365, SaaS CRM of some sort, Xero or Freshbooks cloud accounting, or a marketing product such as Mailchimp or Hubspot. However, I do agree that making a pragmatic choice to favour cloud and explore what benefits new offerings could bring to their business is rarely on the agenda.

"It's a shame if opportunities are missed for this reason as often it is the average small to medium-sized business that has a lot to gain through use of cloud technologies. There was a day that the most functional software was priced for the enterprise only, needing big expensive databases or servers to run it and pricing it out of range of someone needing eight users, and not 80 or 800. Today the cloud has flattened this, bringing per-user pricing and more flexible billing and maintenance models that empower a small company to use the same as an enterprise and pay relative to their size."