Computacenter UK boss: Legacy outsourcing hindering UK's digital transformation

UK MD Neil Hall talked to CRN about why UK customers are slower to come around to digital transformation than their continental neighbours

Legacy outsourcing contracts could be hampering digital transformation in the UK, according to Computacenter's UK boss Neil Hall.

Hall told CRN that while the desire for digital transformation is strong in the UK, customers locked into traditional outsourcing deals could be pondering their next move away from years-long deals.

The UK boss offered this as a possible rationale for why demand around the Windows 10 refresh is softer in the UK compared with the rest of Europe.

"The transformation we're seeing at the moment is actually a little bit quieter in the UK than it is in Europe - as we've seen with some of the deployments of Windows 10," he said.

"Everybody's talking about it, but not as many are going as quickly as we'd like.

"With that in mind, you have to ensure that you continue to have the right level of skills available to the market to support the digital workplace. Because it's more than Windows 10.

"There are a load of other things that customers are looking to do in the business: collaboration, the way that we can help equip the salesforce and the back office and all the operations within our customer base - it can be very different."

Hall said that large legacy outsourcing deals could be a contributing factor for the slower uptake in the UK.

"We've thought about this a lot," the UK boss said.

"Maybe if you look at the outsourcing market in the UK, it's a much bigger market than it is in Germany or France or in other areas.

"When you have outsourced organisations, they might be two or three years into a five-year deal and the customers are considering ‘Do they go through this transformation with their incumbent or are they looking to add to the market? Do they want to do a transformational outsource of end-user compute'?

"Maybe they're waiting for the outsourcer to become a little bit closer about making it happen and the reliance is less upon them? I genuinely don't know.

"I think in continental Europe there are probably fewer external factors in play and they're doing that with a partner that probably manages their own infrastructure."

Hall also predicted that the cloud would start to have a cannibalising effect on the outsourcing segment of some of its competitors, but that Computacenter's strategy enables it to avoid this fate.

"While we have a lot of credibility in datacentre transformation and a lot of the consultancy and project work and a lot of the products that happens in the datacentre, we don't have a huge amount of datacentre managed services - so we're not cannibalising our contract base," he explained.

"Whereas I think some of our competitors, and some of the tier-one outsourcing organisations, are in very long-term property agreements for managing datacentres and maybe there's a little bit of resistance there because of that cannibalisation effect of their own contract base."

Stay tuned for further coverage of Computacenter's update on its cloud strategy