New CEO Watt targets international growth at Softcat

Graeme Watt tells CRN that he wants to grow Softcat's international business, but rules out immediate M&A activity

New Softcat CEO Graeme Watt has set his sights on expanding Softcat's international business, but has ruled out any imminent M&A activity.

Softcat took its first steps outside the UK earlier this year, opening an office in Ireland which managing director Colin Brown said would be a good learning curve for the reseller.

Watt (pictured) told CRN that one of his main priorities in his early days at the helm is to assess how Softcat can grow its customer base.

Watt took over from Martin Hellawell as Softcat's CEO in April and spent his first three months in charge getting to know the business, but will not start looking at longer-term development.

"Over time we'll start thinking not about the immediate future but the mid-term future and how we can expand our addressable market," Watt said

"We're not ready to come out with big statements but already I'm starting to evaluate, knowing what I know about Softcat, the things we should be looking at to make sure we continue this level of performance."

Watt said these plans will likely see Softcat look to grow the business it carries out overseas, but not necessarily by setting up in new regions.

He explained that as the reseller has grown its base of enterprise customers, it has naturally started to work with UK customers in overseas markets that they operate in.

Currently Softcat sees around two or three per cent of its revenue come through international business with UK-based customers, Watt said, but he wants to see this increase.

"We're right at the beginning of that and we have no plans that we have decided," Watt explained. "We're not looking at M&A and we're not looking to move internationally.

"That could change at any time but we're not putting any energy into that right now. From an international point of view, as we have penetrated more into the enterprise segment a lot of those customers are part of multinational countries.

"We already sell internationally to customers that we have in the UK but we want to firm up on that and get a bit slicker about it, and maybe go from a more reactive approach to a more proactive selling approach."

Watt added that his experience working in global businesses will help as Softcat grows out his business, but he stressed that these qualities were not the key to him being appointed CEO.

He also said that he will look to utilise the global relationships that he built with vendors during his time in distribution.

"From a vendor relationship point of view, Softcat within the UK and Ireland is very much embedded with its vendors and has great relationships," Watt said.

"With some vendors Martin [Hellawell] made a point of driving global relationships, and two in particular stand out in Michael Dell and Meg Whitman.

I also have quite a network of European and global relationships and so when we sat down and talked about it I said I should continue those because you don't know when I might need to leverage them."

Stay tuned on ChannelWeb for a full write-up of our interview with Graeme Watt, where he opens up on his relationship with Martin Hellawell, selfies with Michael Dell and the April fool he played on Softcat's workforce