Why Gold is better than Platinum for this Dell EMC partner

Constor founder opens up on record-high revenues and the decision to remain a Gold-level Dell EMC partner

London-based reseller Constor Solutions is opting to stay as a Gold-tier Dell EMC partner despite seeing a record-breaking financial year that qualifies it to level up with the vendor.

Founder and technical director Suman Ramesh Babu claimed that the company smashed through the £5m revenue barrier in its FY18-19 and has now locked its sights on hitting £9m in its current financial year, which started this month.

Dell EMC is a primary partner for the VAR and Babu said it cleared the $4m (£3m) revenue requirement to qualify for a Platinum partnership with the vendor, but has chosen to remain as a Gold-tier partner.

"We decided that rather than being the smallest Platinum partner in Dell EMC's partner portfolio, we wanted to be the top Gold partner," he explained.

"When you get to that tier you get new partners, new account managers and new parts of the business to deal with.

"When you are new to Dell EMC it can be hard to navigate, so we thought ‘We know the Gold partnership world and we have a great partner account manager, so why don't we just be the top Gold partner?'"

Constor claims it generated £5.7m in revenues in its most recent fiscal year, which was driven by the push for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), according to Babu, who noted that its solution set became a much more alluring package for customers.

"We were winning quite large deals around HCI, not only encompassing storage elements, which we were specialist in, but also infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), networking and virtualisation," he said.

"The year before, we were doing tactical opportunities where we'd go in and win an order for £200,000 and we'd put in a datacentre or some storage devices.

"But [in our FY18-19] as we've grown and matured we've got opportunities that have allowed us to not only talk about storage but also virtualisation, networking within the datacentre and some elements of Microsoft too. It was a more complete solution that we were selling."

The reseller plans to nearly double its reported revenue in its current fiscal year to £9m and Babu said it is looking at other potential revenue-generating areas.

"We may open up different streams of business," he explained.

"One of the things we want to do this year is look at how we can do more support and managed services to grow our revenues, and potentially open a small NOC."

It is also planning on increasing its headcount from 14 to 20 in the next 12 months, with a focus on filling technical roles around Dell EMC.

Babu was adamant that there are no acquisition plans in the near future and that he would only think about M&A once the company had hit a certain point.

"Though we've been around for six years, we feel like we're still quite new into our journey and have a bit more to go with what we have," he said.

"I think we can grow to a £20m to £25m company before we think about M&A, but right now we want to run it as a business ourselves."