MSP 01732 759725 38 Manchester-based MSP Everything Tech is growing rapidly by helping clients embrace the modern workplace. James Goulding finds out more from co-founder Lee Wrall infrastructure – clients of all sizes, big and small, that have not yet gone to the cloud for one reason or another. But the vast majority, probably 90%, of our client base is now cloud-based.” Wrall says that customers were already starting to make use of the cloud before the pandemic to reduce costs and modernise decaying infrastructure but has no doubt that the pandemic accelerated the process, forcing businesses to transform their technology stack five years before they otherwise would have done. “Any kind of change is good for us, customers growing, moving premises, changing the way they work and COVID was a catalyst for change. I had been wittering on about Microsoft Teams since its inception in 2017, telling our customers that it was going to be revolutionary and that they needed to be thinking about it. And for the most part that fell on deaf ears, until a global pandemic hit. “Teams is at the heart of Microsoft’s product offering and has been revolutionary in the way people work; it’s completely changed our lives in that you can access everything through a single pane of glass. Teams is instant messaging; it’s video conferencing; it’s files, folders and collaboration; it’s a telephone system. Everything now lives in Teams, even third party applications – Salesforce and the like – now live inside Microsoft Teams. “We find people are spending six, seven hours a day in a single product, which is new even for Microsoft. Historically they have owned the business desktop market, but now, instead of flitting between their applications, people are sitting in the same application all the time. It’s fantastic for Microsoft and superb for customers as well, particularly over the past two years.” Growth potential Another strong growth area for Everything Tech, which Wrall describes as “a huge part of our business” with “massive growth potential” is Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). “Over the last 12 months, it has been difficult to find hardware. Big vendors have not been able to ship enough kit, so people have had to use their own devices – their Dad’s laptop in the kitchen – but they still need to work securely and a virtual desktop is perfect for that. The security on the local device doesn’t really matter because all your computing is being done virtually in AVD. “Being based in Manchester, a good portion of our client base consists of digital agencies and suchlike. The people who join them are computer savvy and don’t want to be told what hardware to use and they don’t want to be lectured to about security. AVD gives us a line in the sand when it comes to security. We don’t really care about your device, as long as you do your business computing through AVD.” One aspect of Microsoft’s offering that Wrall feels customers should be making more of is Microsoft Viva, particularly in relation to the onboarding of new employees in an era of hybrid working. After slow but steady growth in the first six years of its existence, Manchesterbased managed IT services provider Everything Tech has experienced annual revenue increases of more than 30% over the last four years, increasing turnover from £1 million to an expected £5 million this year and growing its headcount to 40. Co-founder Lee Wrall attributes the company’s accelerated growth to a number of factors, including the contributions of Technical Director Anthony Hautin and Managing Director Ruth Hall, who has been involved with Everything Tech almost since its inception but only started working full-time for the company four years ago; completion of the company’s first acquisition last year and the transition of the MSP’s customer base to Everything Tech; and increased demand for IT services to support the growth of existing customers. “We’ve got customers who have been with us for a long time and might still only have five people, but our sweet spot is around 250 users. I expect that as we grow, the size of that client will grow, which is historically what’s happened. When we were small, we tended to attract smaller companies, and as we’ve grown, the profile of our clients has grown as well,” explains Wrall. A Microsoft Gold Partner, Everything Tech offers a variety of managed solutions covering cloud transformation, cyber security & compliance, voice and connectivity, with a particular focus on Microsoft Modern Workplace and M365 cloud services that enable employees to work and collaborate from any location. “We’ve always lived in the Microsoft world. We were early adopters of Microsoft 365, or Office 365 as it was called then, so we were already starting to become a cloud-first organisation four or five years ago when Office 365 was launched. And the development of that platform has really accelerated our growth,” explains Wrall. “We still have clients that have on-prem Modern times Lee Wrall
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