What has been your personal highlight of 2020?
Avoiding COVID.
Which three celebrities would you invite to a Zoom party?
Elon Musk, Lady Gaga and Kevin Bridges.
What has been your guiltiest lockdown pleasure?
Mass consumption of Netflix documentaries well away from the world of IT.
Which tech figurehead has inspired you most this year, and why?
Satya Nadella has unequivocally enabled business to adopt rapid change amid unprecedented times with the lowest barrier to entry via Cloud, most notably putting a human connection into video which has seen Teams rocket to 75 million daily users - two years of transformation in two months! This has helped business to continue, and presented massive opportunities for the channel.
What piece of technology, or app, have you not been able to do without during the pandemic?
Microsoft Surface and my mobile phone. TikTok certainly livens up life.
If you could be anyone else for a week, who would you be and what would you do?
I'd be a ski guide in the Alps - teaching people to ski really badly!
Do you miss face-to-face events?
Yes.
How will COVID leave its mark on the way the channel operates long term?
COVID has challenged us all to rethink how we work, and with it has come efficiency and productivity, as well as demand for more innovation. With that the acceleration of subscription models will continue to change the profile of reseller business as customers demand a switch from capex to opex just as they did in 2008. COVID will also be famed for exponential growth in B2B e-commerce and massive investment to shore up logistics to meet demand. This is seeing a step change in our own supply chains and innovation within.
