'It's the most excited I've been about something for a long time' - Q&A with former Six Degrees Group GM on move to Camwood

Tell us a bit more about Camwood, and what you do

It was founded by Frank Foxall and Mike Welling 20 years ago and its got a fantastic heritage in becoming the go-to people around Windows migrations and the application testing piece.

We're still very recognized around the application packaging and application lifecycle management space. Obviously, you need to maintain relevance and therefore continually innovate to make sure that your customers and your partners continue to use the technology that we built.

We've built some tools that continue to do the compatibility testing, the discovery, the packaging of applications, but we've also built in some automation technology which is a much lighter touch from a customer point of view and takes the average build time of creating an application down by about 70 per cent.

So it's really reducing the speed with which customers can update their applications and make sure they've got the latest versions out into their end user population. Then we've also recently started deploying a tool that manages the Microsoft evergreen process, so that's looking at how you make sure that all the security and system updates are happening continuously.

From our point of view, that enables customers to make sure, through automation, that they're consistently and constantly maintaining the updates that come out as part of the evergreen process.

We've also integrated into that our application management process. You get the security and system updates via Infinity, which was incubated by Camwood, and then we'll make sure that the packages that end user and endpoints require are up to date and relevant, which obviously drives the user experience, but also maintains application security because you're on the latest versions of a control process.

So that's the heritage and where we're going and what we're doing now. With the announcement recently that Windows 10 is going end of life, I think in October 2025, we've now built a SaaS-based Windows 11 readiness tool, which will go and discover all of the hardware compatibility requirements. With the new chipset and Windows 11, a lot of devices that are currently deployed with Windows 10 will need to be refreshed. They automatically discover some of the compliance and compatibility requirements but then we can also, because of our experience and expertise, layer on some of the application layer to that as well to look at compatibility.

We give people the opportunity to start planning around what their device refresh looks like and what their application state needs to look like moving forward as people consider that move to Windows 11.

Over the last 12 months we've managed to successfully transition from being a primarily project-based organization where we built out some application lifecycle managed services to where we are now where we can actually run and operate the customer environments and make sure that they're compliant, up to date and secure on an ongoing operational basis.

How does Camwood go to market?

We can sell directly to end customers. But we do also operate through some of the larger value-added resellers and MSPs in the market, because they typically don't have the expertise around the application state that we built over the years. So we're very much a pillar and a technology partner to some of those organizations to help them to maintain their compliance and service levels around application mistakes, application readiness and application management.

What's on the horizon for Camwood?

We'll start looking at modern workplace such as your virtual desktops, managed services, Microsoft co-management with Intune and SCCM (system centre configuration manager), and then really driving the evergreen process.

With the Evergreen process, 70 per cent of CIOs say they struggle to implement the Evergreen processes. While we're used to it with iPhones where we get system updates and it's just a seamless process, at a corporate level, when you've got multiple different devices in multiple locations potentially using different applications and operating systems, that process hasn't worked as well as organization would have liked to.

So within Infinity you can manage the Evergreen process and we see that very much integrated with our application lifecycle monitoring capability with some modern workplace orchestration to really be the next phase of Camwood's growth.

How is Camwood working with public cloud vendors?

We've got a partnership with AWS. So we can also migrate applications and workloads into their workspaces. And we're also a very strong Microsoft partner. We're trying to make sure that we focus in on the areas that we know we're experts in rather than trying to be everything to everybody. That means we've only just scratched the surface of what we can do around automated application management. The next three to five years are going to be really exciting, because we have to constantly reinvent ourselves and innovate and stay relevant to the market.

How has it been moving from a large reseller like SCC and Six Degrees to a vendor like Camwood?

From a personal point of view, joining someone that's got some intellectual property and some assets is no different, really, to other organizations that also do the same thing, but just operate as a reseller. So it's not a hugely different market or environment for me.

Honestly, it's probably the most excited I've been about something for a long time because we've got so much capability, and so much opportunity. It means that we've got more control over our future, over our roadmap, and our route to market.

How has the Covid pandemic altered the market for Camwood?

Our partners and customers obviously started to move workloads to the cloud, because they had to affect remote working in a controlled and well governed manner. So organizations did that, but then the piece that got left behind a little bit was the application states and the functionality user experience and security of applications moving into that new working model. As we came out of the pandemic now, people are looking at it as a hybrid way of working and there's a real focus on making sure that applications stay up to date, relevant, and well controlled and well governed, because this model is now here to stay - certainly for the next few years, I think.