The Oxygen Awards went live this week.
Here we catch up with Tom Corrigan, CRO of Gold sponsor QBS Software, to find out why they are backing the event.
Why is QBS Software backing the Oxygen Awards?
QBS has long admired the quality, the credibility and the relevance of the journalism produced by the IT Channel Oxygen team, and as a UK-born business, QBS cares deeply about the long-term success of the UK channel and the channel community.
The Oxygen Awards recognise organisations and individuals who are really making an impact, and that aligns pretty strongly with what we believe in at QBS.
You’re category sponsor for the Organic Growth Award. Why does this topic resonate with you?
As the CRO, I am responsible for many things, and organic growth is one of them. Organic growth sits at the very heart of the journey QBS are on and have been on since start-up in 2017.
Since then, we’ve grown up into a business that’s now surpassed $700 million in software revenue in FY26, which is something to be very proud of. The journey has been driven by a very disciplined blend of selective precision acquisitions, alongside our core strategy of a lifetime of consistent, double-digit organic growth.
Sustainable success in the channel isn’t about short-term tactics. It’s about clear strategy, precision, execution and long-term partnerships.
What is QBS Software’s USP?
QBS is laser focused on software.
We help ambitious software vendors scale across a very wide geography, which is now 25 physical locations across Europe, Middle East and Africa.
We’re a genuine growth engine with regional scale, but local execution expertise, which is hugely important for our vendors and for our partners. And we allow enterprise customers to access through their preferred partner a complete and broad software portfolio.
At the same time, we see ourselves as the empowerment engine, providing access to over 12,500 publishers through a single software delivery platform that we believe makes software procurement simpler, broader and far more efficient for our channel partners.
What’s one thing QBS Software has in store for the rest of 2026?
If I had to choose one thing, it would be our software delivery platform, and the go-to-market capabilities underpinning it. This is what makes us easy to do business with, which is what our vendors and our partners want as they both pursue strategies of scalability and growth and recurring software revenues.
Something underpinning that strategy is the momentum we’re now seeing in AWS Marketplace. As we operationalise this new go to market for QBS, we’re really focusing on removing friction from procurement, helping our partners and their customers simplify commercial models, and enabling customers to consume software in the way they want to consume it and in the way that works best for them.
We believe that is going to be a real USP in our software delivery platform in the year ahead.
What’s the recipe for growth in the UK IT channel right now?
The recipe for growth has three essential ingredients.
Number one, there is demand and a lot of market noise around AI, security and cloud-led differentiation. AI is absolutely no longer a buzzword; it’s a new baseline for differentiation. And I believe the winners will be the organisations who help to operationalise AI, not just sell it.
A huge amount of new UK IT investment is tied to AI infrastructure and cloud compute datacentre modernisation. And a significant part of UK spending growth – maybe 11% to 12% at current forecast – lies in those fields. If you’re a partner not focused on AI, security and cloud, I don’t think you’re in the right core conversation.
Secondly, I would say the era of managed services and recurring revenue growth at all costs is over. Sustainable growth comes from recurring software revenues and managed services that are combining to deliver outcome-based value. The fastest-growing IT partners, pursuing the best opportunity, I believe, are those who have made a really decisive shift in those directions: cloud security, cloud management, AI-enabled services.
And last but not least, and something that’s very close to my own heart and that I’m very passionate about, I believe the third ingredient is the strategic partner ecosystem. In the UK, the QBS partner ecosystem is our distributed intelligence.
I believe the best growth comes from deeper, much more strategic alliances, both on the vendor side and on the partner side. That I believe will be a third ingredient to deliver a fantastic growth opportunity for us next year.
This article was produced in association with QBS Software is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
