01732 759725 44 VOX POP Mark Bailey, Managing Director, EBM Managed Services “Since 2017 we have been transforming our business from the typical print dealer to a managed service provider and we have seen an upsurge in sales across all three managed services we provide: IT, telecoms and print. “The latest forecast from Gartner provides some interesting insights into trends we are also seeing in our target market and client base, mainly SMEs. From the report we can see that data centre system growth slows from 11.4 per cent in 2021 to 4.7 per cent in 2023. I believe this is due to the typical SME moving away from server-based software providers to fully cloud solutions. One example is the migration away from Sage Accounting to Xero. Whilst Xero is based in a data centre, the client doesn’t need their own hosted server, therefore there will be less individual SME installs within a data centre environment which will contribute to the drop in spend. “Another trend we can see in the report is that devices spend is dropping consistently. This is quite surprising, and currently we cannot see this translating to affect our business. With the recent events of the pandemic, we have seen that SMEs have come to realise their reliance on their devices. Before, they were taken for granted. Now they are taken as a wise investment and keeping up to date is worthwhile. “In the new world we live in where people have been in lockdown and remote working, we are seeing SMEs actively bringing their staff back into the office. This continues to present an opportunity for EBM. If they haven’t done so already, our clients are taking this chance to upgrade infrastructure, and are looking to generally get ahead of the curve. We have seen this especially ahead of the ISDN/analogue network switch off. Leaving infrastructure upgrades to the last minute or having out of date equipment with limited functions clearly caught lots of businesses out when flexible and dynamic working was required. “It has been a good time to reflect on our own business strategy. For many years we have been advising clients to move into a cloud environment. We feel we have got it right, although you can always learn something new. During the pandemic we didn’t sit still, we looked at ways to increase our product offering and grow the business. Our main strategy going forward is the one-stop shop for all managed services. SMEs are moving away from employing an in-house IT department and outsourcing the skillset to a dedicated service provider, thus saving money and removing any skill shortages they are facing, and recruitment processes they must carry out. We’ve bridged our own gap in the current skills shortage by investing in our own team members and upskilling them to be customer focused and dedicated.” www.ebmltd.co.uk Tom Scott, Chief Technology & Innovation Officer, Aura “Our interactions with customers suggest that the estimates may even be conservative and never before have we had a landscape where every organisation is evaluating how and where they do business combined with the new challenges of remote working on masse. “Aura, whilst only formed in March The advancements in two years for some businesses is more akin to a decade of change and it is that change that is driving our investment in people and new skills 2020, had been developing for two years prior to this, focussed specifically about how to make a workplace feel more connected. We believe the process of assessment and discovery has to be done in a consultative way. The old adage that you don’t know what you don’t know, has never been so relevant, as very few people now really know what you need to know, and customers have typically never prepared for these significant shifts in behaviours. “Technology plays a key part in all of this and in the hybrid world we have quickly evolved to a point where it is vital we keep everyone connected and engaged regardless of where they may be working that day. It is also vital that all of the technological solutions play well together, and that the customer offering is intuitive and adapts to many different ways of working. “Furthermore, it is simply not enough to gather vast amounts of data, this needs to be translated into meaningful insights that inform the chosen audience. I hear a lot of talk about the single pane of glass as a way of bringing all this together, however without the intelligent analysis, too much data can obfuscate the real issues. “Vendors have a responsibility going forward regarding inter-operability and creating a framework to create seamless user journeys. A well-developed API for their solutions are the first step to creating simple and intuitive workflows across vendor solutions.” www.aurafutures.com Mark Williams, Chief Operating Officer, Complete IT, a part of Sharp “With the pace of technological change across all industries, there is always a direct correlation to increasing IT spend. There has seemingly never been a sustained downturn in the past 20 years that has affected our industry in a negative way. To keep ahead of this change, at Sharp we continually invest in new technology and our people to keep ahead and ensure our clients don’t have to invest themselves. “Wage inflation and the resultant skills gap that we are seeing across the industry has a major impact on this and this, subsequently, means that our clients look to us more for guidance. The pandemic didn’t allow our clients and their internal teams to focus on continued... Mark Bailey Tom Scott
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