SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“I think American companies do it much better. In terms of the amount of money they put in to getting that brand and that mindshare out there and the money they’ll put into it. They understand it better. I think in the UK, we’re still behind in terms of marketing thinking and very much still sales-led and profit-led. And sometimes you can see that happening in where the new innovation comes from and which technologies win overall, because of that balance between sales and marketing.”

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“To answer the question about why companies haven’t differentiated is both a generic question of marketing and a question of the industry itself. You can look at any industry and a whole bunch of companies fail to differentiate themselves. And then they just wither over time. Differentiation is really really hard. If you read some of the Jack Trout ‘Differentiate or Die’-type books, you can look at all the different industries, whether it’s a pizza company or a high street retailer, differentiation is really hard. Generally.

So within the IT industry (which is actually a relatively young industry, compared to say, grocery or clothing), there isn’t always the skills in those businesses, the deep marketing skills to understand that point. And so they make points of differentiation that aren’t points of differentiation. And it’s an indictment (a little bit) of the marketing capabilities of those IT services companies. So they might be great at email campaigns, they might be great at datasheets and brochures and case studies and everything. But differentiation is probably one of the hardest things of all. Because it’s that thing about ‘the more you focus, the more opportunity you find’. And most businesses just want to cast the net wide. The sales department of a sales-led company that says ‘Well, we’ll just cast the net wide, we’ll fish for what we can and it’s all revenue isn’t it.’ But the marketing approach that’s very differentiated says ‘We have to go narrower and narrower and narrower and narrower. The narrower we go, the more we can penetrate, the more opportunity we find.’

I think there’s a battle going on between sales and marketing in that regard. And marketing often loses the battle, because they’re not driving the revenue. So I think it’s a generic marketing issue and a management capability issue, a leadership issue from marketing.”

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“There is a trend towards greater automation and that automation is about driving more productivity into the business, fundamentally. No-one and no business should spend money on stuff that doesn’t add value to the customer. And so, automation not only improves quality and consistency but it drives down costs in the business that’s wasted costs. So that is a trend and it’s always been a trend and along with that automation comes the concept of outsourcing, in one sense.

Now, it’s always been understood that you should outsource functions that are both critical to the business, but non-core. And in doing so, you get the best people to provide that critical service, better than you could do internally, and it frees you to focus on what’s core for your business and therefore, can compete better.

So, both the combination of automating things, to drive down costs and make things more productive, and outsourcing things to specialists via a cloud delivery platform, are absolute trends that are going to drive the competitiveness of business.”

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“Differentiation is the most difficult thing to do in many businesses, but particularly in the IT industry. And even more so in the IT services industry.

If you go to any IT or technology tradeshow, you could take ay of the logos from any of the exhibitors and jumble them up, throw them back down and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between any of them. They’re all claiming to provide a range of services or to be the trusted advisor or ‘we’re different because we focus on the customer’, and frankly a lot of nonsense. And it’s really hard. First point, accept it’s really hard to differentiate.

As a business, we’ve (and that applies to every business, it really does). A lot of IT services businesses are being differentiated just by geography. Just by ‘we’re close to you’. And that’s been good enough but the problem with cloud and connectivity is that’s undermining that differentiation.

What we’ve done (and we’ve been through lots of iterations of this), is looked at what the customer wants. And we are very clear in understanding that the customer wants simplicity and ease. And they want to be able to take the latest stuff in a way in which they can trust it and it makes their life easier, not more complex. And we also know from our own research and our own customers, they want a single point of contact, which is not in itself a new concept. They want to be able to go to one company and one support desk and one bill and all the stuff that makes sense.

So what we’ve focussed on is packaging. Our differentiation is about packaging cloud technologies into industry solutions so that people can say ‘you can buy this package, for your industry, with these SLAs, delivered in this timescale, at this fixed price to migrate and this fixed price per month, to use. And it’s the packaging of that technology and complexity into something that’s easy to consume is the way we’re doing it, because that’s what our customers tell us they need. And the experience they have, as a result of that, is simplicity and ease and confidence – which the cloud in general terms doesn’t have today.”

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“The time we’re in right now is hugely significant. Cloud has been bubbling around under different names, even before the term ‘cloud’ came out, it’s been around – the idea of delivering technology as a service rather than buying kit, has been around for a long time. And it’s been at the early adopter phase.

I think what’s significant now is the fact that it might, and is just about to go, mainstream. And if we can get all that agility and productivity and competitiveness that it actually is there to drive into the 80% of businesses in the UK (i.e. the SMB and not just the large enterprises), then the power that has to improve the productivity of UKplc and drive that innovation in that business, the freeing that that has, is transformational.

And the key to that is making it easy to understand so that it can go mainstream and you don’t need a specialist to buy it. You can just understand it and buy a solution that’s going to fit your accounting firm, etc.”

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“You know, “Big Data”…we know about the Nexus of Forces, you know, the four things that are happening that are transforming technology: big data is one of them, social, cloud, mobility.

And I think that when it comes to “Big Data”, I’m not sure the term is the perfect term. It tends to suggest that it’s all about volume, and I don’t think it’s about volume, it’s about complexity of data: data that is across the business. So be that customer service, sales, finance, operations, whatever the business is, you’ve got lot of things to analyse whether you’re a coffee shop or a lawyer, an accountant, there’s a lot of things to understand that can give you an insight into the business. So I think that applies to an SMB in the same way it applies to a multinational business and “big” isn’t the issue, it’s “complex” is the issue.

So we’re absolutely seeing the complex data and “analytics”, is probably a better word, is a key thing for the business and that insight and if they can get that insight through the use of cloud technologies, and then, if they can be more agile than their bigger competitors to use and change as a result of that data, that gives them great advantage. And so, the companies are seeing that and are doing that, are, I think, at a competitive advantage compared to their peers and also compared to the larger players that they typically have to compete against.”

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT

“I think the future of business is about the SMB as well. One of the things that’s held the SMB back has been lack of access to the best technologies, because it’s been too expensive to deploy in the first place and the vendor community, I think, has done a disservice to the SMB by providing them with cut down solutions.

And one of the things we’ve always wanted to do is get that enterprise-class technology available to the SMB at an affordable price. And cloud is the thing that’s allowing that to happen because the SMB can take the same, or if not better, than the multinational enterprise.

So the future is with the SMB if they can adopt that technology and then they can be faster and leapfrog those bigger companies. The potential then is huge for them to be, you know, the SMB is already a big part of the UK industry but you can be super disruptive if it can get access to latest things at an affordable price and then compete with those bigger boys. And that’s exciting.”

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“I think it’s reasonably well understood now that business is moving faster and faster than it ever has. Look at the examples of the social media world of Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, Instagram, and the speed of adoption of those technologies. So, things aren’t slowing down, they’re getting faster. And if you’re going to compete in that world, it makes sense to say that you’ve got to adapt as things adapt to new competition, new requirements from customers, expectations, etc.

So if you’re stuck with some technology, you don’t have to refer to it as “legacy” or “old” if you like, but if you’re stuck with what you’ve got, it makes logical sense that if it’s one thing you can’t adapt or you can’t change, it’s going to hold you back. If you’ve got a set of technology that doesn’t allow you to do the latest and greatest thing, you’re going to be held back, and therefore at a competitive disadvantage. So, you don’t have to be disparaging about the old world technology, it’s just that it’s automatically going to be old very quickly and therefore consuming stuff as and when you need it from the cloud, makes more sense and delivers agility into the business.”

SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“So, I think in the IT industry itself – huge changes are going to go ahead and we want to capitalise on that in one sense by helping with that consolidation. And I think the changes that are happening, and we focus on the SMB, and the changes there are it’s all about the fact that they’re going to be able to be more productive, more agile, and therefore more competitive than they ever have been, if they adopt the right cloud technologies.

And in order for them to adopt the right technology, the cloud industry has to simplify what it does. Because it’s a big barrier for them consuming for the SMB that cloud stuff and it’s evidence in research because it’s too complex, too many vendors saying too many things that are too confusing and too different. And that’s why we focus all our efforts on pre-packaging technologies into solutions to make it easier to consume.”