Technology Reseller v40

01732 759725 34 MSPs Neil Muller Q: The next phase of your company’s development will be as a cloud-first service provider. What does this mean and what are the benefits for your stakeholders? Neil Muller: By leading with SD- WAN, Cloud and SASE as a focus for customers’ digital transformation, we can simultaneously help them support and migrate their legacy IT services at the right time to the right platform. Our customers are leaning increasingly towards these virtualised technologies delivered on the cloud. Their agility, flexible funding models and scalability are appealing to organisations, but creating enterprise-strength, secure and responsive production systems remains a challenge. Cloud doesn’t make that easier, it only makes sourcing the capacity easier. Our customers rely on Digital Space to help them through digital transformation, with our experts, management platform and customer teams engaging directly with them to help them navigate that change. Q: The success of the business stems from both organic growth and strategic acquisitions, such as Arcus Cloud Services. Now you have announced your rebrand to Digital Space, what are your plans for the business in the short and long-term? Neil Muller: For inorganic growth, I am reviewing the IT market constantly, and a lot of my time is spent looking at organisations and their fit to our strategy. I’ve outlined our focus on digital technologies delivered through a service platform. I’m looking at organisations to support that delivery, but I’ve also stressed the importance of our customer experience: consulting, designing, transforming and managing our customers’ IT is critical to our value proposition, so I’m also looking at organisations that could add depth and focus to our customer engagement. In the long-term, my focus for organic growth is to differentiate ourselves in the market as a digital IT service organisation with market-leading customer engagement and a balance of technology and service to help enable change in our customers – all delivered by our very own cloud management platform. digitalspace.co.uk Q: What differentiates your company from your competitors? Neil Muller: Our customer experience! The combination of supporting legacy platforms and digital transformation is a challenge for many organisations as to be successful they must fundamentally change the way their people adopt, use and embrace technology to create customer value. This requires engagement from a digital service provider to position and deliver the right technology to areas that will generate the most value and enable change. Q: How have customer demands changed over the past five years? Neil Muller: The fundamentals are still the same – our customers expect value for money, quality and tangible business outcomes – but customers are relaxing their responsibility for and ownership of the delivery of IT. This last ‘lockdown year’ has also highlighted IT and data’s role in mobilising the workforce and de-emphasising the physicality of IT. With cloud becoming ubiquitous, attention has shifted to data rather than infrastructure. We are seeing customers adopt more agile, flexible sourcing strategies as they’ve been forced by lockdown to digitally transform at least some areas of their business. Clearly the accelerating adoption of cloud services and the desire to enhance the customer experience are also putting more strain on networks and connectivity requirements, which is why our Connected, Productive and Secure solutions are pivotal to enabling our customers’ success. Q: Digital Space is an approved G-Cloud supplier. How are you finding the framework and how has this supported your growth strategy? Neil Muller: The framework itself is an important conduit for technology, although it inevitably reflects older sourcing models. It doesn’t represent the agility and flexibility we can offer public sector organisations through ‘infrastructure as code’. Digital Space is committed to the public sector which, in some areas, has been quick to adopt cloud and digital technology for customer services. Q: Tell us about your background in tech, how you became the CEO of Timico and why you have now rebranded as Digital Space? Neil Muller: I started my career with Computacenter, and over 20 years worked my way up through sales and operations to become UK MD. More recently, I spent three and half years as CEO of Daisy Group, where we acquired Calyx, Damovo, Phoenix IT Services and Alternative Networks to bolster capability and organic growth. At Timico, I came in to run and transform the business, which to date includes the strategic acquisitions of 25SevenIT, Atos IT Outsourcing Services and Arcus Cloud Services and a focus on enabling our customers to be better connected, productive and secure. In the last 18 months or so, it has become clear that the world we once knew has changed. To help our customers maintain competitive advantage whilst adhering to new, agile ways of working, we have acquired new capabilities, restructured our technology and developed our own Connected, Productive and Secure spaces, which integrate via our Digital Space Cloud Management Platform to help organisations accelerate growth. Whilst I am proud of everything we achieved as Timico, I am extremely excited about the future that lies ahead for Digital Space. Q: Tell me more about the services you offer as Digital Space and the market sectors in which you operate. Neil Muller: Our service offering is simple: enabling change through digital IT. We have a broad Connectivity and IT MSP portfolio, but focus on three lead service offerings – SD-WAN, Cloud & Hosting and SASE – as a focus for digital transformation, whilst also supporting and migrating legacy technologies. Digital Space serves the UK mid- market and enterprise segments, focusing on financial and professional services, retail, hospitality and leisure, manufacturing and construction, as well as public and ‘not for profit’ sectors. From Timico to Digital Space We ask Timico CEO Neil Muller why the managed services provider has rebranded as Digital Space and what this means for its short-term and long-term goals