22 01732 759725 What advice would you give a young person getting into the IT industry? Be confident in what you bring to your role. There will be rooms in which your voice may not be the loudest or the first to be heard, but your contributions are valuable and deserve to be heard. What would make your day job easier? I don’t want my day job to be easier! I love the opportunities and challenges that crop up in my role as they teach me something different every day. What’s on your playlist at the moment? I have a really diverse taste in music. I am currently enjoying Setting Sons by The Jam and History Books by The Gaslight Anthem and reliving the recent Oasis reunion with (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?. There’s always plenty of Kate Bush and club classics on my playlists too! What’s the most used app on your phone and why? Instagram or LinkedIn. I follow lots of different food and wine accounts to give me recipe inspiration and I like to keep on top of industry news and events. How do you like to spend your spare time? I like to perform in local amateur dramatic society productions, further my interest in wine tasting and watch sports. I enjoy rugby, cricket, American football and darts to name a few! Fine dining and good wine or curry and a pint? Depends on the day. I love to get dressed up and have fine dining, but nothing beats catching up with friends over a curry and a few beers. Favourite holiday destination? Devon or South Africa, budget permitting! Canalys showing that partners that work with OpenText can make a profit of up to $6.73 per $1 spent. This is a huge opportunity for our partners, which in turn creates a big opportunity for us to be recognised within the market for what we do. What should your partners be looking at to maximise growth in the next 12 months? For me, the biggest area of growth is the reseller to MSP shift. The number of partners offering managed services is increasing as the channel looks for ways to retain current customers and attract new ones. The market will become increasingly competitive, so I think the best way to maximise growth is to get a strong understanding of who you are as a business, what you can offer and, crucially, why you are different to the competition. Did you get into IT by accident or design? A complete accident! I completed my Masters degree in Theatre in 2015 and realised I needed a job to tide me over until I got my ‘big break’ (I’m still waiting for it…). I was lucky enough to join the sales team for a hardware reseller, transitioned into Marketing and from there moved into cybersecurity distribution. I’ve never looked back! If you could swap your current job for any other what would it be? When I was younger, I wanted to be an archaeologist, but now I think I would quite like to be a forensic investigator! I like puzzles and finding ways of solving them. Which business leader do you most admire and why? I admire any leader who is capable of leading with strength as well as humility and honesty. What’s the best bit of business advice you’ve been given? Never burn bridges, you never know when you might have to cross them again. What have been your business highlights of the last 12 months? It’s been a great year. Launching the new and improved Secure Cloud experience to our partners was a massive highlight for me, as well as bringing our new EDR and MDR solutions to the market. We have strengthened our relationship with Microsoft even further, which is of huge value to our partners as we navigate the many changes brought in this year. Personally, I was incredibly honoured to be a finalist for the CRN Women & Diversity in Channel Awards in the Marketing Employee of the Year category. What makes OpenText stand out from the crowd? The OpenText differentiator is the additional value we provide our partners. Not only do we provide the core services for every security stack, we are a longstanding Microsoft CSP partner with knowledgeable teams that are dedicated to supporting our partners with their Microsoft licensing, rebates, partner programs and more. What is currently having the greatest impact on your business? The positive impact of AI has been massive. Not only are our teams finding more efficient processes for handling our daily tasks, the market opportunity for delivering AI-related projects has boomed. Meanwhile, the rise of shadow AI is a really interesting opportunity to educate our partners on the governance and management aspects of using AI with business data. OpenText are deeply dedicated to assisting organisations harness the power of AI, with the aim of empowering all workers to leverage structured and unstructured data within AI tools. We’ve developed Aviator for our enterprise customers and will be looking to integrate this into our SMB offering in the not-too-distant future. Where do you see the next big opportunity for your business? We recently undertook a study with Steph Hackney, Channel Marketing Manager UKI & Nordics at OpenText Cybersecurity, provider of a unified, end-to-end platform that helps customers build cyber resilience via a holistic security portfolio extending from prevention, detection and response to recovery, investigation and compliance. 60 seconds with… INTERVIEW Steph Hackney
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