01732 759725 12 TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMS Giacom prepares for next stage of growth with rebrand and launch of Cloud Market partners on that journey. In Giacom we have a brand that is reputable, recognised, trusted, well known.” Giacom has revenues of circa £390 million and over the last five years has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 13%. This has given it roughly 5% share of the estimated £10 billion that UK SMEs spend annually on the technologies in which Giacom specialises. Currently just 50% of SMEs’ total spend goes through the channel. The other £5 billion is spent direct with vendors and carriers – money that O’Brien believes small businesses with fewer than 250 employees should be spending with local, trusted resellers and MSPs. “We want the channel to be the place that small business buys all its cloud, connectivity, IT and comms,” he said. Great opportunity Nathan Marke, Giacom Chief Operating Officer, believes channel businesses have a great opportunity to capture a bigger share of SMEs’ spend, not least because the current procurement model is clearly not working, contributing to the UK’s poor productivity – the second lowest in the G7 – and exposure to cyber crime. “Entrepreneurs are going into an O2 shop and they’re buying a phone and they’re buying some SIMs. They’re going to PC World and buying some laptops. They’re getting a credit card and they’re buying some Microsoft licences, some backup. They bring it all back to their business and they try to make it work. And, no surprise, it doesn’t work very well,” he said. Part of the problem is that very few SMEs have in-house IT expertise. A study commissioned by Giacom three years ago found that less than 1% of all SMBs and just one third of businesses with 50-250 staff employ a dedicated IT person. This means they rarely get the advice they need around how to improve efficiency, productivity and security through technology and automation. “Small businesses aren’t going to solve those problems with the way they currently procure. The channel is the answer to fixing these problems for small businesses,” Marke said. He estimates that there are 15,000 resellers/MSPs of a reasonable size in the UK. Giacom deals with 5,000 and the fastest growing of these are nearly all MSPs. “They will go into a customer and say for £200 per month, per employee I will manage all your existing stuff. I’ll give you a brand new suite of SaaS solutions that all work together. I’m going to secure it for you. And I can do all that on a really flexible month by month subscription basis. That’s where we’re seeing the fastest growth. That’s what we see these MSPs building and then adding on professional services, managed services, security services.” Marke adds that for smaller MSPs this can be difficult. They need to be able to deliver subscription services to hundreds of customers and they need to be able to take a whole suite of products to market. Yet, it’s almost impossible for them to contract directly with the vendors of those products. This is where Giacom comes in, using its £250 million buying power to negotiate better pricing on behalf of its partners and making it easy for them to quote, order, provision, support, bill and, ultimately, scale through automation and digital portals. Cloud Market takes this to the next level. It already replaces five previous portals for cloud, connectivity, comms, IT hardware and a knowledge base with a single platform and a single digital experience. Over the next two years Giacom plans to spend an additional £12 million on new features and new software tools to enable partners to be even more efficient. These include data-driven insights to drive sales opportunities; assisted sales journeys to make it easier to deliver complex solutions; provisioning for cloud and connectivity; partnerbranded storefronts with more self-serve opportunities for their customers; and a customer acquisition engine that matches SMEs with local resellers/MSPs. Summing up, Marke said: “We are one platform and we’re making it really simple for technology resellers and MSPs to provide everything they need to create brilliant technology solutions for small businesses. We’re 100% independent and we’re aiming to be the best people to do business with.” Digital Wholesales Solutions, a 100% indirect, 100% independent supplier of cloud, connectivity, comms and IT for small and medium-sized businesses, has entered an exciting new phase in its development with a change of name to Giacom and the launch of a single, unified cloud platform through which reseller and MSP customers can buy its full range of products and services. The name change and consolidation of five existing platforms into a single Cloud Market comes four years after the company split from Daisy Group, since when it has acquired the Giacom cloud marketplace and the Union Street billing business, while securing investment from mid-market private equity firm Inflexion. Giacom CEO Terry O’Brien said that despite relaunching as Digital Wholesale Solutions (DWS) in 2019, some people still associated the name with Daisy, which he felt was holding the company back. “The strategic imperative for us is to be indirect-only and independent, yet that association with Daisy kept dragging us back into potentially being seen as a direct organisation. So we needed to make that separation really clear. Another reason for the rebranding is that over one third of our revenue, and the fastest growing category in our business, is now cloud. The market transformation over the next two, five, 10 years will be to cloud and we want to be seen as an organisation that can take our All in one place Terry O’Brien
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