Ambitious UK software vendor HALO is turning to the channel to help fulfil its ambitious growth aspirations, it CEO has told IT Channel Oxygen.
The Suffolk-based ITSM, PSA and CRM specialist has grown rapidly to become the UK’s second largest homegrown software vendor behind only Sage, with $100m annual revenues and a $2bn valuation.
Last month, Founder and CEO Paul Hamilton revealed he felt HALO’s market value could one day rival those of ServiceNow, Salesforce and Workday.
“I have no reason to believe this can’t go to the hundreds of billions,” he said.
But in a follow-up interview, Hamilton acknowledged that HALO requires the nous of the channel to help it grow beyond its midmarket stronghold and into the enterprise space.
“We’re ambitious, but we don’t want to have 20,000 people,” Hamilton said.
“The only way to do that is through a network of partners.”
“You can’t really just walk into a global bank as a 25-year old”
Some 95% of HALO’s 200+ employees are graduates in technical or consultancy roles who have no commercial background.
“We’re not a well-networked organisation at all. We don’t really know anyone, and have never hired salespeople as salespeople,” Hamilton said.
“As we move more into the enterprise space, we’ve recognised there’s a hell of a lot of stuff we don’t know,” Hamilton said.
“You can’t just walk into a global bank as a 20 or 25-year old – you don’t get taken seriously. Hence why we’ve now started working with partners.”
Over the last 18 months, HALO has switched to a predominantly partner-led approach on implementations, working with IT services giants such as DXC Technology, as well as smaller IT support firms. Some 90% of its implementations are now outsourced to partners, up from zero 18 months ago.
But just 20% of HALO’s sales are currently generated via partners, Hamilton said.
Although “every MSP in the country” works or is familiar with HALO because of its HaloPSA offering, its brand is largely unknown among CIOs, Hamilton said.
“We’ve done so little awareness and demand generation work, and that’s where we want the likes of Softcat, Bytes, CDW, SCC and Computacenter to tell all their accounts about HALO,” he said.
“We’ve become a viable option at enterprise level”
HALO is gunning for $11bn-revenue rival ServiceNow, but is a third of the price and built on more modern technology, Hamilton claimed.
“Over the last couple of years, we’ve become a viable option at enterprise level,” he said.
“Any organisation in the world with thousands of staff will need a platform like HALO to manage the workflow that goes on within these organisations – the communication between departments, the tasks and projects, and all the rest of it.
“HALO is really becoming the nucleus of these organisations in terms of what’s going on and managing all the work – which is basically what ServiceNow has been.
“The oldest bit of tech we have is seven years old. It’s a much more modern stack, built upon our $100m multi-year partnership with AWS, or deployed on-prem. It’s more responsive. It’s more intuitive. It’s a better design.”
HALO was a representative vendor in analyst Gartner’s recent IT Service Management Platforms report, Hamilton stressed.
“Gartner is impressed with what we’re doing and is educating its clientele that HALO is a good option,” he said.
“There is plenty more opportunity to work with partner organisations on a sales motion,” Hamilton added.
“We’re going through this process with DXC at the moment, to turn it from being ad-hoc word-of-mouth into a proper sales motion where you have a decision tree.
“We’re beginning to build that out with partners, which should help on the acquisition side.”
This article was produced in association with HALO and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
