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01732 759725 26 INTERVIEW fuel them with more opportunity, so they grow beyond their original business plan. If you look across Nuvias Group, we have global logistics, because some of our big international customers have international customers; we obviously have greater strength in the balance sheet, so we can afford different credit lines with vendors; we have 24x7 and second level support opportunities that we provide for several of our vendors’ technologies today; and we have scalability when it comes to IT and moving to digital working models.” Future acquisitions For the next two years at least Nuvias will maintain the brand and structural integrity of Cloud Distribution, only adding the tagline ‘a Nuvias Group Company’ to its logo. Nor are there any plans for it to expand into Europe, where Nuvias has the same strategy to engage early with emerging technologies. So does this mean that Nuvias will be looking to make acquisitions in Europe as well? “There are two ways of building against our strategy: one is to make organic investments, setting people aside to drive an early engagement model and live in that world as Cloud did – it doesn’t have to be a separate company; or we will be acquiring. The question, as always, is will there be an appropriate candidate that fits that strategy well and, even if it fits on paper, do the people gel, does it make sense, does the culture fit, which we think are all strong arguments for Cloud. So, we are looking [at acquisitions], but we do have other options.” As for the UK, England says that further acquisitions are possible here but not a priority while Nuvias beds in Cloud Distribution and puts in motion the business plan they have developed together. “As a business, we are continuing to look for opportunities. Right now, our preference would be to make acquisitions in other spaces. Having said that, the UK is a prize market for us and our biggest country in terms of revenue contribution, even though Germany is catching up, so we want to continue to invest in the UK, both organically and on the M&A side. And let’s face it, M&A is heating up right now and there is also a potential Capital Gains Tax change in the UK that might make it interesting for an owner to sell now rather than later. Developments like these could create further opportunity, so we’ll see what happens.” www.Nuvias.com Businesses in the dark over ISDN switch-off Nearly half (46%) of businesses have no idea that their communications services will be switched off completely by 2025 as part of the analogue and ISDN switch off, reveals new research by Spitfire Network Services Ltd, a provider of telecoms and IP engineering solutions to UK businesses. Its ‘Switch On to the Switch Off’ survey of 400 UK-based SMEs highlights the opportunity resellers have to switch customers to IP technologies and their responsibility to keep customers informed, with 83% of businesses surveyed having no visibility into when their services will be switched off and 77% not having made any preparations for the disruption the switch off will cause. By 2025, the last elements of Openreach’s analogue and ISDN network will be turned off and replaced by an all-IP network, but Openreach will be switching off legacy services at individual exchanges before then. The first stage is to announce a ‘stop sell’ date for each exchange, after which no new affected services can be ordered and no changes to existing services can be made, no matter how minor. More than 200 exchanges are scheduled to be in the Stop Sell phase by January 2022. Dominic Norton, Sales Director of Spitfire Network Services Ltd, said: “When you consider that the services businesses rely on to ensure they can serve their customers will be gradually switched off between now and 2025, the lack of preparedness has surprised us. Now is the time to take action.” He added: “To facilitate the analogue network and ISDN switch off, newer technologies are being more widely adopted. Those using an analogue or ISDN telephone number service will need to move to Voice over IP and take a SIP service. This could be a cloud PBX, for example, or fibre Ethernet for larger offices. The impact on telephony and broadband services is far reaching and businesses need to be reviewing their options now to ensure continuity.” www.spitfire.co.uk acquisition gives Nuvias a much sharper focus when it comes to early engagement with new technologies. An ideal fit For England, there are other factors that make Cloud Distribution an ideal fit for Nuvias, including zero overlap in their respective product portfolios – he describes Nuvias and Cloud Distribution as operating in parallel swim lanes – a shared commitment to partner engagement and, above all, compatibility with Nuvias’ existing strategy. “The way I look at acquisitions is that if you can acquire into a strategy, you have a much higher likelihood of success. The value-added distribution world is all about people. You can ruin a business with bad processes, but you can’t build a value- added business with good processes; it just doesn’t work like that. Maybe you can do that on the volume side, but Nuvias lives off its people – and it’s the same for our competitors on the value-added side. “We don’t qualify for our business by our intellectual property, by patents we have recorded somewhere or by the investments customers have made into our technology, if they happen to be an Oracle shop or a Cisco shop or a Juniper shop. We don’t have that. What we have is people, who therefore have to make the difference. “In acquisitions, if we don’t have a strong win:win message that wins the hearts and minds of the people we acquire and doesn’t lose the hearts and minds of the people we already have, the likelihood of success is quite small. But, if you are acquiring into a strategy that we have already shared with the team and you can say ‘Hey, we worked out together that this is where we want to go and this is what we want to do’ and then build in an acquisition to accelerate that journey then people will obviously welcome that. It also gives the acquired party a role to play; it gives them something to contribute so that they know that they are not a sideshow that just happened to be available at a cheap price but are an integral part of a shared future.” As evidence of the commercial and cultural alignment between Nuvias and Cloud Distribution, England says that the entire acquisition process, bar one dinner, was done virtually and that at no point over the three months it took was there any talk of cost synergies. Instead, it was all about growth. “We want them to do what they have been doing in the past. We just want to ...continued Dominic Norton