01732 759725 22 VIEW FROM THE CHANNEL With Keith Ali, Group MD, Creative ITC Technology Reseller (TR): How’s business? Better or worse than 12 months ago? And how confident are you about the future? Keith Ali (KA): Creative ITC has enjoyed continued commercial success in turbulent market conditions, tripling in size over the last five years. We’ve established a global footprint across five continents, opening five new datacentres in the past 12 months alone. For Creative, the best is yet to come. We’ve enjoyed phenomenal growth and I know the stage is set for that to continue. This year will see us step up another gear on our growth journey. We’re in investment discussions to fuel our development through both organic and inorganic routes. Watch this space. TR: In what areas are you experiencing strongest demand? KA: To help clients futureproof their IT and overcome challenges when modernising IT systems, we’ve developed a Modern Application Platform (MAP) based on kubernetes, designed to de-risk legacy system updates while stretching budgets through container orchestration and performance improvements. It’s a single-stop solution for updating older software to the very latest languages and frameworks, while simplifying scary and costly cloud transitions. There’s also rising demand to make IT simpler to manage and less costly. We understand aaS (as-a-Service) solutions need to align with future needs and dovetail seamlessly with existing IT investments. Hot on the heels of infrastructure virtualisation, application virtualisation is snowballing. Yet compute and storage – and therefore virtualisation – are coming closer to the edge. This increases the need for greater workload mobility, automated operations, and improved performance and resource availability. These are some of the main drivers behind our focus on developing more tailored, scalable solutions for customers. TR: What recent wins are you most proud of? KA: I’m proud of Creative’s continued commercial success, but it’s not just about the financials. Establishing our channel partner programme is not only contributing towards our growth but, more importantly for me, it’s also clear evidence that our business strategy is paying off. Tapping into Creative’s awardwinning managed services and AEC industry expertise, we’ve helped deliver our VDI solution with one partner and are now working together on extending the customer relationship with further managed services and a cloud-hosted rendering solution. We’re helping another partner to transition an architecture client from legacy on-premise infrastructure to more agile cloud-based managed services. And, working with another partner who identified an opportunity to provide additional services, we’re offering improved technical support to their client via our 24/7 managed UK service desk. As well as partnering with other resellers in areas such as DRaaS, BaaS and DaaS, we’re working alongside one of the UK’s leading distributors to deliver a range of cloud solutions to their partner community. When we were building Creative, I wish we’d had a partner who really got what we were about and could help us on our journey. I’m immensely proud to be in a position now where we can offer that kind of much needed support and expertise across the channel to help other companies to grow, while we continue to go from strength to strength ourselves. TR: Where is business proving most difficult? KA: Attracting and retaining the best talent is more challenging now than at any time I’ve ever witnessed. It’s not that the talent pool has evaporated – more people are being attracted to IT – but the fact that technology has rocketed up the corporate agenda, creating an unprecedented range of opportunities. Growing reliance on technology is great for the channel, but it’s also brought fresh challenges. Hybrid working is both liberating and demanding. We’ve all had A fast growing IT infrastructure and global cloud services provider, Creative ITC designs and delivers managed services and cloud solutions that help clients maximise the value of their IT investments and achieve business objectives sooner. Through its purpose-built VDIPOD platform, Creative ITC is a leading provider of VDI and desktop-as-a-service solutions for heavy data users and global project teams in the AEC, finance and healthcare sectors. It also provides a range of cloud enablement solutions, including data centre technology, and multi-awardwinning cloud services covering everything from security, backup and disaster recovery to infrastructure, network and storage. At the end of last year, Creative ITC launched a channel partner programme giving other channel businesses access to its extensive networking, infrastructure and cloud expertise, technical support capabilities and technology solutions. Here, Group MD Keith Ali gives his view from the channel. View from the Channel Keith Ali
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