Terry Burt
Career so far: Disco ticket marketer, accountant, support director, marketing director, managing director, startup proprietor, chief operations officer, vice president of services for EMEA, entrepreneur and founder of 2e2.
If you could be anyone else for a week, who would you be and what would you do? Salma Hayak's husband - I don't need to elaborate on the rest.
What would you have as your last meal? Seafood salad, beef wellington and panna cotta.
What is the best corporate jolly you have ever been on/taken partners on? The Barbados 2020 World Cup, while staying at Sandy Lanes.
Do you see the cloud as a threat or an opportunity? Though the economy is still tough, many businesses have now experienced several years of cost-cutting and need to grow, but to do this when capital is tight requires a complete transformation. 2e2 definitely sees this need for transformation - of which the cloud is a part - as an opportunity. There is a lot of confusion surrounding the term cloud, which is understandable when so few vendors and service providers have yet to define what they mean by cloud. At 2e2, we rather take the stance of asking, ‘Could it be cloud?' We work with our customers to ensure their needs are met - whether helping them through optimising, automating or virtualising their data centres, to providing managed services within their data centre, providing hosted services from our data centre or providing automatic provisioning in a flexible way, with infrastructure and software. We'll agree the right commercials with our customers, ensuring they can flex up and down and enjoy innovation as well as cost reduction throughout a multi-year partnership with 2e2.
Have any of your predictions come true this year? My business partner Mark McVeigh won't buy a family home, but he will buy a G-Whiz electric car.
What do you see as the channel's biggest challenge in 2011? A lack of differentiation in an increasingly competitive market, where margins are eroding. Those that stick solely to the channel model of old - purely reselling products and wrapping only product-led services around them - will find the new world hard.
IT decision-making within our customer base is increasingly falling under the remit of business decision-makers, and unless VARs and SIs are equipped to sell to those people, traditional channel players will experience an ever-increasing cost of sale.
At 2e2 we have invested in customer-led propositions - what we call business architectures - that map our capabilities to the outcome our customers are trying to achieve. Of course, we need to ensure our salespeople are happy and confident to talk to new types of contact, which is why I have invested in a multi-year sales coaching programme, retaining professionals to work alongside my sales team, supporting them through business outcome-led sales cycles.
What is the best part of your day? Counting women to make myself go to sleep.