US reseller SHI planning to hire at least 60 UK heads

Microsoft partner's local arm has been given licence to invest in building out its mid-market sales force

The trend of US resellers expanding on this side of the pond continues with the news that SHI International is planning to add at least 60 staff here next year.

The UK was praised for being SHI's fastest-growing operation in a recent results statement from the New Jersey-headquartered outfit, which claims to be Microsoft's largest North American partner.

SHI has been in the UK for nearly 20 years, but its local business has traditionally focused on supporting international clients.

More recently, it has invested in a mid-market team and UK country manager Darren Brodrick said SHI CEO Thai Lee is backing the UK business with further investment based on recent results.

Its Milton Keynes office currently houses around 130 staff.

"Our legacy business is large, global enterprises," Brodrick said. "But a couple of years ago we began to [also] focus on the mid-market - 250 to 5,000 employees. We've had some good success in that space, and that's where the investment is coming from."

The UK reseller market has more of an international flavour to it than five years ago with the acquisition of Kelway by CDW, the arrival of US reseller PCM this summer and recent local expansion of other US-based names such as WWT and Zones. The weakening of the pound against the dollar in recent years means their money will go further here than it did five years ago.

Most of the planned hires for SHI will be for mid-market sales staff. The firm will also be looking for pre-sales consultants and service staff.

"We could be a 200-employee business by the end of next year," Brodrick said.

SHI counts Microsoft and VMware as its two core software vendors, with Cisco, HPE and Dell EMC - for which it recently signed up as a Titanium Black partner - acting as its trio of key infrastructure vendors.

SHI said recently that its UK division grew 50 per cent in the first half of its fiscal 2017 as overall group revenue rose 12 per cent year on year to $3.7bn (£2.8bn), although it did not disclose local numbers.

Growth was driven by two areas, namely Windows 10 refreshes and datacentre and cloud, SHI said.

"Most of the Windows 10 success we've had has been with our US-based customers with local operations but over the last few months there has been lots of interest from the UK market for Windows 10 migrations. I expect that business to continue to grow in 2018 as well," Brodrick said.