Industry Voice: Becoming the 2021 Cloud Distributor of the Year: An interview with Mark Davies, MD of Westcoast Cloud

Mark Davies, the MD of Westcoast Cloud, is philosophical. In November, Westcoast Cloud was named Cloud Distributor of the Year at the 2021 CRN Channel Awards. But rather than seeking any personal glory from the award, what matters most to him is the recognition of the work his team put in, day-in, day-out for their reseller partners. Here, Mark explains that he's delighted with the award and also why it won't be going to his head.

What does winning the CRN Cloud Distributor of the Year award mean for Westcoast Cloud? And what does it mean to you?

It means that there's recognition across the industry of the great job the team at Westcoast Cloud have been doing since the company began six years ago. For me, that's the most important thing by far. I want my team to feel the validation from their peers.

Right now, we've probably got the strongest and most conscientious team that we've ever had. We've got a team that cares about what they do for our partners. And I feel that more now than I ever have in the six years we've been doing this. But it's not that I think everyone's suddenly doing a great job. They've been doing amazing work over each of the past six years, it's only that this is the year they've been recognised like this.

What sort of changes have you seen during your career in the channel?

Everyone understands that the tech industry is constantly moving and changing - that's what I love about it and it's why I've been in it for over 20 years. But the changes we've seen recently are like nothing that's gone before. Most of us are familiar with Moore's Law and the idea that processing power keeps rocketing while prices keep falling. You only have to look at what computers were capable of just 10 years ago to see how much has changed.

But now we're seeing that technology is creating societal change. Think about the advent of businesses like Facebook and Google, or the mobile phone - they have shaped the way people work, shop, connect with each other, everything really. Technology is now woven into the fabric of everyday life - it's a seismic change that no one could have predicted.

How do you see Westcoast Cloud's role in the channel?

Our mantra has always been finding ways to help our customers' businesses. That means our job is to cut through the noise and simplify things for our customers. So, it's all about training, enabling and upscaling the partners. The key to that is to find something simple and build out from it.

For example, email. How many resellers don't use email? None of them - they all use it. And when you use something yourself it's easy to understand the benefits. We take that approach with everything: it might be a basic Microsoft 365 licence, and from there you might extend into selling the benefits of Teams, which could open the door to conversations about SharePoint.

That's how you can take a reseller along a path where you build capabilities with increasingly complex software. But of course, from time to time Microsoft will make changes to the technology or the licencing and we also need to simplify that for our partners. The key thing is, they don't need to worry about any changes that come along - we'll just decipher them and show them what they need to do next.

What have the past two years been like?

It's safe to say last year was a case of all-hands-on-deck. Lots of people were forced into remote working when they weren't necessarily ready for it. It meant that just getting through day-to-day or week-to-week became the priority for many businesses across lots of different sectors. It was a sort of survival mode outlook.

But as we've gone into this year, they've come out of that survival mode and into planning mode. That means making sure people have the right software to work effectively from wherever they are. And also thinking about security in a whole new way because there are so many more devices connected to business networks. Having the basics, like Teams, isn't going to be enough for the longer-term. Businesses will have to think about how things like personal phones and laptops are being secured, and also home routers with basic firewalls. So there are still many questions waiting to be answered.

But from our immediate perspective, the adoption of Teams has gone through the roof and licencing-wise, it's not slowed down at all. So even though CSP has been around for six or seven years now, there's a huge amount of growth still to come.

Is there anything you would like to see the vendor community do differently?

I think part of the challenge vendors face is that they are trying to market-create. And to an extent, that's inevitable and necessary. But I think customers sometimes get a little concerned about the pace of change.

Take cloud computing as one example. That's been around for 20 years and started out being called application service provision. It's taken most of those 20 years to get to the point where the cloud is within everyone's reach. There are similarities with things like AI and the internet of things. We're all told that these new technologies are going to change everything - the possibilities they open up are like nothing we've experienced before, after all.

But how long will that take to come to fruition? It might not be 20 years, but maybe we all need to accept that the speed of tech-adoption isn't always as fast as the speed of tech-evolution.

I think that vendors understand that. But they have other pressures on them. They've got to hit their numbers, keep their shareholders happy, attract investors, and so on. It's a dichotomy. But I believe it can benefit all of us if the speed of adoption is talked about in more realistic terms, and put into timescales that feel appropriate and manageable to customers

This article is funded by Westcoast Cloud