Crayon UK GM Hayley Mooney on 2024 investment priorities and AI

Mooney tells CRN how data and AI will play a part in the UK business next year

Crayon UK will be focusing on two things in 2024, services for customer cost control and its AI momentum.

That's what Hayley Mooney, general manager at Crayon UK recently told CRN as the UK subsidiary of the Norwegian services giant gears up for a new year.

"Overall as the Crayon business, which is a global business, we're going to continue to capitalise on our market opportunity," she says.

"We optimise for our customers, and we innovate for our customers. And those two things are absolutely the highest priority.

"From a cost optimisation point of view, our services are built on a foundation of software asset management. We've evolved that right through to those cloud services delivering FinOps to our customers today, and we see huge market demand for that.

"Customer engagement is around saving money and getting control and visibility of that cost. That's the key big area we see."

She adds that Crayon UK's strap line is "optimise to innovate", and the group aims to use those customer cost savings to drive innovation and momentum into their business.

"We're very fortunate to have a significant amount of data and AI capability and we've had it for nine years," Mooney continues.

"It's not something that's new to us but all of a sudden the move into the world of AI with Azure, OpenAI and ChatGPT being the buzzwords of the year we've seen huge momentum on that side of things.

"We're finding now that our customers are actually approaching us not just for the optimisation services but how to drive innovation into their business with AI."

AI innovation

Mooney explains how Crayon UK takes an advisory approach to innovation for customers.

"We've worked across multiple environments. We could work with an HR department to drive employee engagement and build capability using ChatGPT and large language models into those environments to encourage collaboration.

"Copilot is another huge topic at the moment from a Microsoft technology perspective, and being able to leverage all of that AI technology to better collaborate across the businesses where we're seeing a lot of use cases at the moment."

The Crayon group recently signed up to a new partnership with Microsoft to become one of few select partners that can offer Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Crayon CEO Melissa Mulholland said the tool will allow the Norway-based firm's advisory skills on change management and adoption will enable customers to effectively use the new technology.

Investment priorities for 2024

The past two years Crayon UK has been investing in its people and team.

Looking to 2024, Mooney says the group now wants to focus on driving the return of that team.

"In 2024 we'll invest in the areas particularly around service capability and service depth of our team. But actually, we built a really strong team this year and we're really now focused on driving the success of that team into 2024."

She continues to hammer home Crayon UK's commitment to services and how channel partners as a whole can take advantage.

"Our customers have never needed services as much as they do right now.

"I think the visibility and control that we can offer to customers is what's most valuable.

"Where they're moving, evolving and migrating to the cloud, the environment is complex. It's needed more than ever to be able to get that visibility.

"I think where channel partners play a role is being that advisor and being that trusted pair of hands so that customers themselves don't need to make the investment."

Crayon UK's challenges

The technology skills shortage has been an industry-wide hurdle almost every channel partner, distributor and vendor has lamented to CRN over.

Crayon UK is no exception.

"Recruitment and retention of people is always a challenge," Mooney explains.

"There is an incredible landscape across the market of opportunity for people development across all partners or vendors.

"The tech market is booming and we don't have enough people.

"Fundamentally the biggest challenge we're facing at the moment is bringing the right people in the business and then making sure we can create a unique culture and environment to maintain those people with you."

Watch Mooney talk more about the tech skills shortage in this CEO Killer Question video.