Role: Group Managing Director, DTP
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
When some of the pillars within our strategy to focus harder on business outcomes started to gain real traction within our client community.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026
To accelerate the work we are doing in the area of social value with our clients, namely addressing digital poverty, where we use our position as a disrupter in the IT asset disposal market to generate funds to create pools of devices that clients use to support those individuals and families in need within the regions they operate in. Social Value as a Service.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
Keeping up with the current pace of change, to make sure we continue stay relevant to our clients and within the market, and accurately predict direction so we can jump ahead in some areas.
Is AI being over-hyped?
It definitely feels like that, but having already successfully built and sold an AI business, and working on the next AI spin out, I would say no.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
We spun out a higher education AI business in 2012, developed and grew it for 10 years, then exited it when someone came in with a silly offer.
The business was originally focused on helping universities accurately identify potential student early leavers, using the power of big data, historical activity patterns, and some clever algorithms, allowing us to accurately predict 92% of leavers up to three months before they would have left. This allowed the university clients to deploy support resources to make an early intervention around student retention. We could also accurately predict what degree level a student would leave with, so tutoring resource could be focused more on the lower-level achievers and potential fails, and before we sold the business, we were accurately highlighting student disengagement which was due to a wellness issue, so they could be triaged into wellness support well before their personal wellness situation became critical.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
We will see some of the wealthiest leaders in the sector start to clone themselves. Joking of course, with maybe the exception of Jeff and Elon, although I would be surprised if they were not already on that journey.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
Not sure whether it passes as a tech gizmo, but it is my home coffee machine, having purchased the first one during CV19 lockdown, with my Barista skills being better than most UK service stations so called baristas. You can probably read between the lines in that driving a lot of miles annually, service station coffee quality is a bit of a bugbear for me.
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
First of all I would be looking for someone interesting to take care of the food, so thought about Gordon Ramsey, but in the end I have gone for Stanley Tucci to own that aspect.
Then it’s all about stories, with someone from the world of business, and someone from the world of sport. With my two picks being Richard Branson, who needs no introduction, and Billy Beane, who was an innovator in the world of sport, bringing the Moneyball, data-driven approach to the world of baseball, and who is acknowledged with this approach being adopted across the world of professional sport.
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
Nice Guy, but boring as f***
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
I would pivot between Neil Sawyer at HP, and Matt Harris at HPE, both having worked their way up through the ranks at their respective orgs, although Neil did have a short sabbatical at Lenovo, and due to them starting on the HP shop floor, so to speak, both lead and drive the culture that fits HP/HPE perfectly, and which is clearly demonstrated by the results they are achieving.
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