Logicalis: 'We're hot on the heels of acquisitions in the UK'
VP of global business development reveals to CRN his priorities for the business and its M&A plans
Logicalis is expecting to make some acquisitions both in the UK and the US this year, according to its new VP of global business development.
Mick McNeil - who joins the managed service provider after a decade-long stint at Microsoft - told CRN that the company wants to acquire service-rich businesses such as MSPs and cloud MSPs.
"We are heavily focused on acquiring managed service providers, cloud managed service providers in regions where we think we can increase our book of business," he elaborated.
"We are driving strong momentum in some regions, such as the US and UK, where we are also actively seeking to accelerate our business by acquiring other successful cloud managed service providers."
"We are hot on the heels of acquisitions in the UK and US and, hopefully, we'll have something to share soon."
Logicalis' UK business has had a tumultuous few years as losses spiralled, but MD Alex Louth told CRN in October that it was now "set up for success" as it focused its attention on services and subscriptions.
McNeil said that the UK business is showing signs of growth and praised the UK team for driving that recovery with "innovative" solutions.
"The UK has been on a bit of a turnaround in the past few years, and we're now seeing very positive signs to the growth of our business, both top and bottom line," he said.
"What's interesting about the UK is that it's relatively small compared to the size of some of our other businesses, so we can be more nimble and accelerate towards the future state that we want to be.
"Alex and his team have driven quite a significant demand with their existing and net new customers to drive workloads to the cloud. I would expect the UK team to start driving proper growth from the existing business, which is primarily product-led, to a recurring services business, which is our cloud managed services business, in the next year."
McNeil's has three priorities that he is focusing on as part of his new role. One is developing Logicalis' relationship with Microsoft as one of its key vendors and working together to create "industry-specific" solutions for its customers. He will also be concentrating on the company's shift to cloud.
"We're coming from a place of being a VAR - being quite transactional - to a digital transformation enabler, which means delivering cloud solutions and managing them for our customers to ensure that we deliver on the outcomes that they need," he emphasised.
"That essentially constitutes a business model evolution that we're focusing on, delivering consistently across our regions. When I look across the globe, we've got very mature businesses across everything that you would expect, and we have an opportunity to deliver best practices in a consistent way globally"
McNeil's third priority is to take advantage of the massive opportunity for Azure growth in its customer base.
"We need to continue to be ahead of the market in terms of our growth rates of this business. It's a tremendously exciting time to be at Logicalis because we're outpacing the market in growing this Azure business," he stated.
"We believe given that we've only addressed less than one per cent of our 10,000 customers globally with these offers, that we've got an acceleration in that growth rate to come."