Managed.IT - issue 53

26 MANAGED.IT 01732 759725 No one brought in by a private equity company to evolve and grow a business they have invested in can expect a quiet life. Just ask Simon Payne. Following his appointment as CEO of CSI by the company’s new owners in August 2017, he has been kept busy, building a new leadership team from a mixture of old and new blood, acquiring and integrating cloud solutions provider Niu Solutions, moving to a new 16,000 square foot HQ on Birmingham Business Park, opening a new client briefing centre and, most recently, unveiling new branding and positioning for the company. It was the latter – clearly and strikingly evident on CSI’s bold new website – that piqued the interest of ManagedIT and encouraged us to pick up the phone to Simon Payne. That and his assertion that Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are legacy. More on that later, but first we asked him what attracted him to CSI in the first place. “In essence, I saw a business with strong foundations – CSI had a set of very loyal, long-standing clients; it was very client-focused; its proposition was strong; it had a very good financial history – and if you have solid foundations in a growth market, i.e. cloud platforms, you can do a lot of exciting things to take the business on the next step of its journey,” he said. Inevitably, this involves migrating more of its customers to the cloud and to a much greater extent. “Some legacy clients take traditional monitor and management services from us – traditional managed services – but by far the largest growth area of the business involves us taking all of a client’s workloads to the cloud and delivering them back to the client on a capacity- on-demand model, which gives them true flexibility,” Payne explained. “The other massive growth area is security. We have a very robust managed SOC and SIEM set of solutions which we wrap around all our cloud delivery services.” Complex requirements This is just as well, because CSI’s clients – it has around 1,500 across the UK, built up over 35 years – tend to be upper mid- market and enterprise businesses with complex applications, complex security requirements and complex compliance obligations. “If you are one step below the top level of enterprises, you are off the radar of the top management consulting firms, but you are very firmly on ours. We understand that those sizes of business – upper mid- market and enterprise organisations – have the same requirements as the largest enterprises; they are highly complex, highly regulated, highly sensitive. “We operate with clients that have critical applications that underpin their business performance. In some cases, because of their strategic importance to the business, they need to be very carefully migrated from a co-lo or a premise-based model to a cloud model. We have a very consistent set of services around mitigating the risks and adding value along the way as we pick up those workloads and move them to the cloud and then deliver them back to the client in a very secure environment.” ManagedIT speaks to Simon Payne, CEO of CSI, about the company’s rebranding and why Managed Service Providers are a legacy concept From MSP to ‘Enterprise Performance Partner’ INTERVIEW