'We'd love to be a £1bn business' - Ethos Technology CEO on ambitious growth plans
The Cohesity, Pure Storage and Panzura distributor says it is not looking to sell up any time soon
A unicorn-hunting storage VAD that helped seed the UK market for Cohesity has set itself a £1bn-revenue ambition.
Ethos Technology CEO Omar Galbraith set up the Oxfordshire-based outfit in 2015 to bridge the gap for US ‘unicorns' eyeing quickfire UK expansion.
The Pure Storage, Cohesity and Pandura partner claims to mark itself out from competitors with its focus on helping vendors and resellers win new logos. It ranked 37th in CRN's 45 Distributors You Need to Know 2022.
Echoing comments made recently by Distology CEO Haley Roberts, Galbraith told CRN he felt too many UK start-up VADs sell up too early once they have snared a unicorn vendor.
"That's not in our business model at all. We've got a goal that we'd love to be a £1bn business," he said, talking to CRN for the recent Top Distributor 2022 report.
"We've got a three-year goal to get to £250m. And if we get to that mark we'll re-evaluate our business model. We're completely self-funded and me and my business partner are relatively young. We've been approached because of our growth and the vendors we carry, but we don't even want to be having that conversation right now."
Galbraith's idea of setting up a UK VAD geared towards US unicorns - conceived while working for a network and cabling company in Bermuda - gained momentum following a conversation he had with Nutanix co-founder Mohit Aron.
"I was selling Nutanix very early on when they had just 17 staff, and I told [Aron] I was looking to go back to the UK to start a business. He said "well, I'm just about to leave Nutanix to start a new company around secondary storage called Cohesity'. I gave him a pitch about what we wanted to do. I thought there was a real gap to start a UK distributor that finds these unicorns and helps them get into the UK a lot quicker, and that we'd do all of the consultancy, proof of concepts and technical write-ups. So Cohesity was our first vendor, and we were very successful," Galbraith explained.
Galbraith said that Ethos is on course to grow from £24m to £70m in its fiscal year to 31 January 2023, an uplift he attributed to the exclusivity it has built with its reseller partners.
"I don't believe there are many VADs in the UK at all. Our sweet spot is the fact that we actually help our resellers and vendors gain net new logos," he explained.
"We had a meeting with one of the largest resellers in the country about three months ago and I said ‘look, we've brought £7m of new business to you recently'. And then the sales director said ‘No you haven't, you've actually brought £20m to us. You brought these Cohesity, Pandura or Pure Storage deals to us, and off the back end we sold the networking, the VMware support contracts'.
"Because of the stage we introduce partners to the end customer, it's early enough for them to go in there and work a whole project."