10 01732 759725 Vendors have to offer a strong margin and market development opportunity for partners, underpinned by our internal expertise. We support everything we sell, rather than relying on the vendor to do that on our behalf. It’s almost a last resort to bring in a vendor for support or enablement. TR: Could you tell readers a bit more about your value proposition and how this is reflected in the Exertis Cloud team. JY: I’ve spent 25 years in channel roles. I’ve worked in distribution, I’ve worked in retail, I’ve worked in MSPs. Prior to joining Exertis, I was Commercial Director at Highlander, now FluidOne. We built a substantial cloud business there and I’ve been able to lean on some of that expertise at Exertis Cloud, as have other members of the team who followed me across or who came from other MSPs, distributors or vendors. When I was on the other side of the fence and dealing with distribution, I sometimes felt there was a lack of understanding, a lack of empathy, just vendor messaging, unfiltered, passed straight through, without an obvious consequential message or value proposition for us. What is sometimes forgotten is that for an MSP, there has to be a margin opportunity but also a tangible business benefit for the end user, so when we built our value proposition, we had two personas in mind. One was the reseller, the MSP, who we sell to directly, and the other was the end-user business. Probably about 14 or 15 months ago, not long after I came in, we sat down as a collective to work through what our value proposition was going to be, how we were going to differentiate ourselves, where we thought we were already winning and where we didn’t think that we could play as strongly. We identified a huge expanse of SMB resellers that are somewhat unloved, not only by competitors that are more interested in the top 10% or 20% of players but also by some of the vendors, and we thought how can we support Over the last 12-15 months we’ve been restructuring the business, defining our proposition and building a team that can take that to market. We’re now just trying to accelerate that. TR: How many team members do you have now? JY: The core team is around 20, not counting ancillary departments that we plug into, like HR and finance. We have the benefit of the larger PLC business to support us; we are like an entrepreneurial start-up in a PLC. That’s very much the spirit of what we’re doing. TR: How has Exertis Cloud grown over the last three years in terms of products, users and revenue? JY: Obviously, we have started from a relatively low base, but our aspiration is to be a £100 million pound cloud business by the end of 2027, and we’re well on track to achieve that. Typically, we’re growing at between 20% and 30% year‑on-year, with particular growth in our core vendors of Microsoft and Adobe. Rather than being, as some of our competitors are, a marketplace where there is a plethora of cloud and SaaS vendors, we’re trying to keep it carefully curated and build out an ecosystem around our Microsoft core. Anything that we build in there is to migrate, to backup, to secure the core Modern Workplace or Azure workloads that we’re managing. Then, with Adobe it’s about building from what was traditionally that Creative Cloud base with elements such as Document Cloud and Acrobat AI Assistant and some of the recent announcements made at Adobe MAX in the US. We’re seeing a lot of things come together. There are commonalities, for example between AI Assistant and Copilot, and there’s a role for both to play, depending on budget and workload and application, so we’re trying to build an ecosystem. You won’t find 30 different vendors. You’re more likely to find a dozen or so that have been hand-picked based on their technology and the margin opportunity. Technology Reseller (TR): Please could you give me a quick overview of Exertis Cloud and your plans for 2025. James Yates (JY): My remit when I came in 16 months ago was to develop the base that had been built by my colleagues and to really drive the cloud business forward. Exertis are relatively late to the party with cloud – we’re now in our third year of trading – but we’ve tried to turn that into an advantage. I know the channel very well from being on the other side of the fence in the MSP world, and that has given me some insight into how we can build something that brings value to partners and a point of differentiation for vendors, because I don’t think any of our vendor partners are looking for share shift. That’s pretty apparent; if anything, we are hearing from vendors that they want to manage fewer partners, whether that’s distributors or resellers/MSPs. INTERVIEW With James Yates, Managing Director, Exertis Cloud Q&A James Yates Technology Reseller talks to James Yates, Managing Director of Exertis Cloud, about key developments in 2024, including the launch of its new partner programme, and his priorities for 2025
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