SCC gives CRN the inside view into its two new brands

James Henigan is the MD of the service provider's two new consolidated units – SCC Hyperscale and SCC Cyber

"Privately owned British IT service provider SCC is ramping up in Public Cloud & Cyber Security after a strategic restructure to create two new organic business units following the commitment of £300m of funds to expand as a group.

In November, CRN spoke to CEO James Rigby where he shared extensive detail of the capital the reseller has amassed and how it will be spent.

In particular, he highlighted two new business unit launches - SCC Hyperscale and SCC Cyber - as being key to his growth strategy.

Here, SCC Hyperscale and SCC Cyber managing director James Henigan has lifted the lid on what the businesses are, and his plan for execution and building market share.

As an overview, SCC Hyperscale is the reseller's public cloud migration unit, with a focus on Microsoft Azure and AWS.

SCC Cyber Services is its security business unit, again with a strong Microsoft focus.

Henigan makes the point that the capabilities already existed within SCC Group.

However, leadership has been keen to consolidate and organise the two business units into separate, distinct brands.

Creating a new identity

"It's not that we've started these things from scratch, but with SCC being a big business, which sells a lot of services and works with a lot of vendors, it was probably quite hard for us to harness all of those capabilities and accelerate our growth in those spaces," he said.

"One of the changes we made last year was to bring all of those resources and assets together into their own business units to give them some form of identity."

Henigan said the strategy is two-fold: helping customers better understand what SCC has to offer; and funnelling investments into "filling the gaps" in SCC's capabilities in a more targeted manner.

"I think SCC is making a real statement in the market coming out of the back of COVID to say we're making these big and bold decisions about putting in accelerated investment...And there's significant capital to invest"

Why now?

SCC says it sees heightened demand from the market around moving the business of public cloud migration away from the classic ‘lift and shift' procurement conversation.

Henigan says being able to go to market with a stronger message around offering more will help his new business units take off with customers.

"We all know cloud adoption is one of those things where if we don't help customers transform, they don't get the right value. We need to help customers leverage public cloud native services, transform their IT to leverage innovation and harness agility, and that's not an easy thing.

"In my view, no one's necessarily doing it brilliantly in the market, currently. There is still a lot of lift and shift still."

When it comes to cybersecurity, as everyone in the channel knows all too well, demand is high, and growing, as threats proliferate.

"We're certainly not seeing a slowdown in the amount of risk that our customers face," Henigan said.

"Breaches are not slowing down. And the visibility of the pressure on our customers with cyber insurance, is also coming into play. Being able to protect themselves to even get insured - I think that trend has got a long way to run.

"And it's really exciting. Because if you look at some of the technologies that are emerging in that space, and the investment vendors are making in cyber technologies and alignment to models - such as Zero Trust - the amount you can now do to help customers is really clever, interesting, and good for growth."

At the tail end of last year, Group co-CEO James Rigby revealed £20m of capital had already been allocated to both SCC Cyber and SCC Hyperscale.

Henigan says that the headcount across the two is currently sitting at around 100, with ambitions to double that this year.

IT spend trends and recruitment challenges

CRN UK and sister site CRN US spent much of the last quarter of 2022 reporting on the flagging macroeconomic trends affecting both geographies.

Partners in both locales told us that end user CIO and CISOs were closing the purse strings on some of their larger projects in the pipeline.

Henigan says concerns in the end user community of this nature are currently not damaging SCC's own top line.

"It is really interesting, because if you look back to last quarter's results, the public cloud growth figures from Azure and AWS did dip slightly. And there was commentary around asking is that people holding back because of the economic environment? I think there's an element of that, but we haven't seen that ourselves directly."

He added: "I also think there's an element of us starting to see more people transform what they actually put in public cloud. And that reduces spend and makes it more efficient.

"Both AWS and Azure have said for a long time, that the value you get from moving to public cloud is in using cloud native services. If you're still just moving the server from A to B to C, you probably spend more on Azure and AWS than you would do in a private cloud."

However, a constraint that SCC is feeling is the perennial hunt for talent.

It's a challenge that is top of mind for the MD with his goal of hiring 100 people this year at the head of his strategy to double the size of the two business units.

SCC has taken the view that internal investment in recruitment and talent development is key.

SCC founder and chairman, Sir Peter Rigby, opened the reseller's own digital skills training hub in November last year.

Henigan says he'll be leaning heavily on the SCC Academy to build out his team.

"When we started to build our plans around these two businesses, the skills component was obviously critical.

"And we knew that we need to be able to create talent to fuel our own growth, because we're not going to be able to hire everything from the open market. There just aren't enough of the right skills out there, we get that."

"So, we've basically created a programme that we've invested in nationally, where we're bringing in more people. And this could be early career as well as mid-career people wanting to offer cross-skill.

"And in 2023, we'll be able to more formally launch those Academy streams in cohorts of trainees."

As previously reported, SCC's expansion capital of £300m is made up of £200m of equity and £100m of debt.

Its most recent financials saw the reseller turn over £2.6bn in its year to 31 March 2022.

It says it's on course for revenues of £2.9bn in fiscal 2023.