James Rigby

Chief executive, SCC

Career so far I joined SCC in 1993 in the Engineering Services division, and was appointed to run the Technology Sourcing division in 1995. I was later made general manager and took on responsibility for service delivery operations across Europe, as well as playing a major role in all group acquisitions, before becoming UK managing director in 2006.

What was your first job and were you any good at it? After university I worked at Groupe Bull in Paris for two years. It was a demanding position and I went through a very steep learning curve, but at the very least my French improved dramatically.

What has been your career high point to date? The seven years since stepping up to lead SCC have been extremely rewarding. We've grown rapidly, repeatedly achieving double-digit growth, and are looking forward to yet another positive year in 2014.

Has 2013 been good, bad or ugly? It has been good. We've signed an unprecedented number of major service contracts, become the first UK provider to achieve pan-government accreditation for our Secure Multi-Tenanted Cloud Cloud service and won the Oracle Excellence Award for Specialised Partner of the Year - Global, EMEA and UK in Server and Storage.

If I wasn't working in the channel I would probably be... trying to get work in the channel! It's where I want to be.

What do you see as the channel's biggest challenge in 2014? The continued deployment of cloud computing - cementing its place in a new, flexible breed of ICT architecture that is both more responsive to user demand and also procured in a completely different way. It will remain the channel's major focus next year. At SCC, we will continue to concentrate on this and other high margin segments of the technology industry including storage, intelligent networks, virtualisation and datacentre technologies.