New Aptum CEO: 'We're going to be a powerful force once we're all used to being on the same team'

Ian Rae talks to CRN about his priorities, plans for growth in the UK and EMEA, and M&A

Aptum's new CEO has laid out his strategy for the company as he takes the helm following the departure of Susan Bowen.

Rae entered the scene when Aptum acquired his company CloudOps in January.

The new chief exec highlights this integration as his immediate priority.

"We don't see this as a disparate, siloed business unit. We're working on how we connect the puzzle pieces into a larger puzzle that addresses the range of customer problems."

Switching focus to his long-term aims, Rae says he is prioritising the cultural evolution of Aptum's business.

"We are going to be a very powerful force once we are all used to being on the same team, understand where our positions are on the field, understand the playmaking that we do, not just on the field with each other, but also within the context of our partners in our ecosystem.

"I think you're going to see an evolution of our identity as Aptum in the next 12 months, that will represent the cultural evolution that it takes as a business to support the strategic execution."

Growth in the UK and EMEA

Based out of Canada, Rae brings a different perspective to the Aptum business, and views the UK not only as a market in itself, but also as a path to working in EMEA.

"Driving growth in the UK for me is about first of all, making sure we understand what the market priorities are there," he says.

"For example, North American hyperscalers are very powerful, globally, but what we're seeing in the UK and EMEA is perhaps even more of a tendency to want to combine some hyperscale cloud with regional cloud with edge computing."

Rae explains how he sees the regions as a more diverse market in terms of what the options are, where there is less of a race to "put everything on Amazon, Google and Microsoft."

"And as a result, I think it lines up well with our larger puzzle that we're bringing together. Because I think as Aptum we're uniquely qualified to help across the hyperscale to regional cloud to edge."

Rae added he doesn't just see opportunity around cloud growth in the UK and within EMEA, but also around partners.

"But the other angle I think in the UK and also in wider EMEA is there are a lot of service providers in particular mid market and small managed services providers that we think are great opportunities for partnership for Aptum.

"One of the things that we're bringing together in our puzzle is, CloudOps is a software platform that was built for service providers, built to enable service providers that we're now working on integrating with the portfolio of Aptum's and services.

"I think we're going to be in a position reasonably soon to start offering that platform to regional managed services partners in the UK."

More M&A?

After kicking off 2023 by splashing the cash with its buy of CloudOps, Rae comments on whether the channel should expect more acquisitions from Aptum this year.

"We're quite confident that we've got all the right puzzle pieces for our strategic plan to come together," he says.

"We don't feel we have any missing pieces. In terms of acquisition, I would say the way we'd look at it is talent acquisition. That's something which I'm going to be paying attention to.

"Another area you might see us paying attention is looking to do M&A for the purpose of increasing our presence in a particular vertical."

Challenges

Pinpointing the challenges currently facing him and his company, Rae explains how inflationary pressures and the rise of market shaping technology such as AI are having an impact.

"Number one is a challenge probably many are facing and it's about understanding what's happening in the market, where we think it's going and just rapidly iterating our plan to align with that," he says.

"The market is shifting. This is partly for economic reasons, it is also partly because of the natural evolution of technology.

"Obviously, AI has hit a bit of a tipping point and that's having an impact. Sometimes when these things are happening in real time in the fog of war, you really have to be extra observant, and put even more work into trying to assess what's happening in the market from multiple angles."