Infinigate to bring acquired acmeo 'MSP-in-a-box' solution to the UK

Murray Pearce opens up on acmeo's 'MSP-in-a-box' services and what it means for UK partners

The UK will be one of the first countries to experience the integrated offerings of Infinigate's acquisition of acmeo.

UK MD Murray Pearce told CRN that he expects the rollout of acmeo's services in the UK to happen in mid to late summer.

The German MSP and cloud distributor specialises in managed services and cloud products, as well as training partners on strategy, technology, sales, marketing, and employee management and development.

The Infinigate group purchased acmeo at the end of last year, with CEO Klaus Schlichtherle telling CRN sister publication Channel Partner Insight in March that it would take 18 months "to really get every country on board" with its services.

Pearce said that the new addition has a "blueprint for success" in terms of how it trains MSPs and VARs seeking to diversify into services.

"It does nothing but sell to MSPs and has an entire value-added model around finding MSPs and enabling them," he explained.

"It has training programmes and seminars that are best-practice to show partners how to build a services business.

"It does something that I've never seen a company do, which is to have a literal blueprint for a company.

"For example, it will take a security VAR that hasn't done services before, it trains the partner on a seminar for a few days and takes them through every aspect of what it is to be an MSP; everything from how it affects your P&L, how to position services, to how you build different tiers of service levels, and so on.

"Not only has it trained people to do that but it has templated the entire business - it's MSP in a box.

"At the end of this training, the partner will have the know-how and the templates to build up their own service offerings and back-end deliverables - it's an entirely new category of value-add.

"For us, the focus will be on pulling our portfolio together and adding the additional value through this training to show partners how to build a best-practice MSP."

Pearce is optimistic that acmeo's offerings will aid his ambitions to grow the distie's UK revenue to £100m in the next four years.

Another part of his strategy is to sign four well-known vendors a year; in the last 12 months, it has signed up SonicWall, Aerohive, CensorNet and Centrify off-shoot idaptive.

"The market has moved quite quickly in the last few years towards cloud and MSP services," he said.

"When we looked at our portfolio we realised that we could strengthen it so we made a conscious decision to do that and that has led into us looking at certain types of vendors.

"There is a programme of activity behind [our growth plans], including further vendor recruitment, as well as opening up and launching a specific managed security services business unit which will have dedicated salespeople and a specific, separate portfolio of technologies.

"We see the UK as a strategic market and seek to bulk it out by investing in it and making great strides with our vendor signings."