technologyreseller.co.uk 19 Q&A continued... Q&AWith Andy Venables, CTO and Co-founder of POPX POPX, provider of fully managed and integrated MSP platform that transforms operations, service and business management functions so that service providers can deliver industry-leading levels of customer service, celebrated its fifth anniversary on September 1. The company was born when co‑founder and CTO Andy Venables, who started his career at London-based MSP Adapt before moving to ServiceNow, had the idea of marrying the benefits of a managed service and fixed monthly subscription to the strengths of the ServiceNow platform. By providing ServiceNow as a managed service, POPX gives UK MSPs an alternative to professional services-led deployments. “The traditional model is people procure cloud platforms and then get some professional services in. My dad liked to say consultants are people who borrow your watch to tell you the time. But that’s how it’s done. That’s the typical model; you pay per hour, and you assume all the risk yourself,” explained Venables. “Before I was at ServiceNow, I worked for an MSP, Adapt, and I saw the value of a managed service. You get both the service and people on standby at the end of the phone who are going to look after it for you. Essentially, the MSP sells you the outcome, not just the circuit or the storage or the cloud server. “My inspiration was to say, why can’t we offer ServiceNow as a managed service? And that’s exactly what we did. As far as I’m aware, we’re the only people doing it the way we do it now. That’s not to say that other people don’t do ServiceNow managed services. They absolutely do. But they do it very differently. It’s more of a services retainer contract, which really is just professional services labelled as managed services.” Today, POPX has around a dozen MSP customers, including such well known names as Node4, its biggest client, Focus Group, CSI and Red Helix, and a headcount of 40 people, with around 25 employees in the UK, 10 in India, and four or five in Serbia. Here, Andy Venables tells us more about how POPX stands out from the competition and the benefits for its customers. Technology Reseller (TR): You describe POPX as unique. In what ways is it different to other companies offering ServiceNow as a managed service? Andy Venables (AV): ServiceNow, like many cloud platforms, is becoming complex and if you’re going to be in it, you need to be fully in it. There’s a phrase in the ServiceNow ecosystem, ‘centre of excellence’, and if you’re hoping to get value out of ServiceNow – the Ferrari of the service management platforms, with the power and price tag to match – you need a centre of excellence and that means no longer just hiring a couple of developers, putting them in the corner of the room and hoping they can get on with it. You need technical leadership; you need architects; and because the platform can do so many things – ticketing, CMDB, ITOM and so on – you need an expert in each area, and that becomes very cost prohibitive. But the biggest problem for me is it becomes a distraction. If you want to be a software and development company, that’s great. But the vast majority of folks we speak to don’t. They want to get on and deliver their services without having to worry about this complex thing called ServiceNow. So, back to your question, what we do that’s a bit different is we offer that full service of ServiceNow developers, architects, business analysts, process consultants, testers, solution consultants, just about everything, as a managed service. We bring a whole team so the customer can just buy the outcome, as we like to say. We’re selling you the outcome, which is best practice service management delivered by ServiceNow. TR: What prompts customers to pick up the phone to POPX? AV: Many MSPs of a particular scale have private equity backing and one of our initial strategies was to talk to the private equity community. Those private equity houses are very sharp, very financially astute and they want to improve the value of their asset in the most efficient way possible. We believe we’re an excellent partner to enable them to do that. Pitching and selling our message to the private equity community who then introduce us to an MSP’s CIO or CEO has been really successful for us. We have some headline figures around how we can improve the EBITDA of a business by implementing ServiceNow in a risk-free way. If you’ve just acquired an MSP and are looking to increase its value, ours a really attractive model. Andy Venables
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