CRN catches up with the distributor's managing director Michael Frisby (pictured), to discuss the highlights of a challenging year and what winning the Distributor of the Year (sub £250m) Channel Award has meant to the business and his team
What has been the highlight of 2020 for your business?
For me the highlight of 2020 for the business has been the resiliency of our teams. They haven't missed a beat from the moment we locked the office in mid-March and flipped to remote working. Everyone has stayed 100 per cent committed and focused on serving our partners to the best of their ability and embraced the new way of working.
Like many other businesses, we've seen an increase in productivity and the quality of communication between the different teams, making the best use of the technology we have available to us. I'm not quite sure how we would have survived without Microsoft Teams!
On the flip side though I'm very aware of "online meeting fatigue" and the "groundhog day" nature of work now so we're making an extra big effort this Christmas to bring the teams together online to have some fun together.
The 60+ per cent revenue growth the teams have delivered and our partner satisfaction Net Promoter Score of 92 are obvious highlights, along with of course, winning the CRN Distributor of the Year Award (sub £250m).
How pleased are you to have won?
Anyone who knows me will tell you how competitive I am and so winning the award for me personally means a great deal!
I am especially proud of the great team that we have at Vuzion and our focus on being the best we can be every day, to help our partners be successful in their business.
Winning awards like this means we can all go home to our friends and families and be proud of the company that we work for and that we have contributed to that success. Having a sense of achievement, I believe, is a key ingredient in being happy and satisfied in your work.
Our philosophy is that we are only successful if our partners are successful and so this award reflects the success of our partners and I want to say a big thank you to all them for their support and partnership.
How has the award been received in the company so far? How did you celebrate?
Winning the award has been incredibly well received.
We had a big virtual watching party on the evening, sharing the live stream of the event with the team, and lots of champagne was drunk that evening in celebration.
Unfortunately we haven't been able to be physically together to celebrate as we normally would at this time of year, so we are putting extra effort into our virtual Christmas activities to ensure that we celebrate this together.
What difference will winning this award make to your business in 2021?
The recognition from this award helps give credibility to our value-add proposition and approach to distribution. As we continue to grow, awards like this helps us recruit more great people into the business.
Vuzion is a fast growing business and dozens of resellers join our community each month, and this award highlights our focus and mission to help as many MSPs, Resellers and ISVs as possible, build successful profitable cloud businesses.
Which areas/technologies are you going to focus on in 2021?
Our business is anchored around Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, and an ever-growing portfolio of services that complement and enable our partners to build complete solutions for their customers.
From a solution perspective supporting remote work scenarios is going to continue to be important and something just about every business needs, which also increases the need for more flexible and cloud-oriented security solutions which keeps remote workers and their identities, devices and data secure and private. We've pulled lots of resources together on the remote working page of the Vuzion website to help our partners take advantage of this opportunity.
As the leading Microsoft Azure distributor in the UK, and the first to transition to Azure Plan and its associated benefits, we will continue our focus on Azure and building out the education, go-to-market and technical services that we provide to our partners to help them grow their businesses.
One of the other big opportunity areas we see is Cloud Telephony. As the UK launch partner for Microsoft 365 Business Voice in late 2019, we have seen phenomenal growth during 2020, largely driven by the need for remote and hybrid working solutions, and we expect that growth to continue and accelerate in 2021.
Michael Frisby is managing director of Vuzion - www.vuzion.cloud
