Top VARs Q&A: James Rigby, SCC

As part of our Top VARs 2016 report, we catch up with the CEO of SCC, which ranked fifth in the list with revenues of £653m

In FY16 your UK business was 27 per cent services-centric. Do you see that as an important metric, and how high is that number likely to rise?

I suppose it is a key metric, but I would like to see both [product and services] grow. I could easily increase that [services] metric by reducing my product business even more. So in that respect, it is kind of a fake metric. I'd really like to see all the customers using all our offerings, including cloud and managed services. That's when the business works at its optimum.

What have been the key achievements of the past 12 months?

Realising the benefits of the datacentre and cloud acquisitions, and the success of the managed print business. We have made some bold and brave investments in the past couple of years. They are now paying off; we are winning business, and we are filling up those datacentres to the point where we are expanding them.

Will that expansion be in your existing datacentres, or are more acquisitions likely?

This wave of expansion is for our existing facilities in Birmingham and Fareham. Once we have done that, we will have to acquire again, and we are looking at what to do when they fill up in 18 months' time. That is the key thing [in terms of acquisitions] - the portfolio is reasonably complete, and we cover all the aspects of infrastructure provision.

But we will certainly invest; you have to put a lot of cash into [the datacentre business], and that will take up a lot of our profit. In France we will acquire cloud and managed services business.

How big do you expect the SCC Vietnam operation to become?

We are going in with 40 people in support, and I could see us at a couple of hundred in two years. In DevOps we are starting with 15, which could grow to 25.

Rigby Group is building a distribution business with the Nuvias operation - is there any relationship between that and SCC?

No, they are absolutely at arm's length. It is the same as we had with SDG in its day.

What are your objectives for the next 12 months?

Making significant progress in automating our services operations and continuing to grow our business in the mid-market - nothing particularly revolutionary. The more of that we can do, the more will go on the bottom line.

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• Top VARs 2016