Role: CEO, TIEVA
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Honestly, it’s been a tough year – and I think a lot of UK partners might say the same, with economic headwinds and general uncertainty making planning feel a bit like guesswork. But looking back, I’m proud we kept building: new cloud services, a growing data practice, and meaningful AI progress. Solid foundations that feel right for the climate we’re in.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026.
We want to translate the groundwork we’ve laid in cloud, data, and AI into services that UK organisations actually find indispensable. There’s real demand out there; we just need to meet it properly.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
Right now, the skills gap — finding and keeping great people is genuinely hard, and getting harder. But underneath that it’s people in a broader sense: making sure my team has the support and clarity they need in an industry that doesn’t slow down for anyone.
Is AI being over-hyped?
In the short term, probably – and I think UK customers are starting to see through the noise and ask harder questions, which is actually healthy. The longer-term potential still feels real and possibly still underestimated. Partners who help customers find genuine value rather than just sell the story will be in a much stronger position.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
We continue to identify AI use cases within our own operations. The real benefit has been credibility: when we sit down with our customers, we can speak from real-world experience.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners will evolve over the next 5 years?
I think the UK channel will consolidate faster than most people expect — not just through M&A, but because smaller partners will struggle to keep pace with the investment required to stay relevant in AI and cloud. The survivors won’t necessarily be the biggest or the most technical; they’ll be the ones with the deepest customer relationships and the most trusted reputations. In a market as relationship-driven as the UK, that counts for a lot.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
Claude. I use it every day – for thinking through problems, drafting, analysing documents, and sense-checking ideas before I share them. I’m appreciating its capability more and more every time I use it, which helps me think about use cases across the business – I’m not saying I couldn’t cope without it, but I’d notice its absence pretty quickly!
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
Jeremy Clarkson would make the list. Love him or loathe him, he’s built an incredible ability to connect with a huge audience while staying authentically himself.
Steve Carell would be there purely for entertainment value – preferably in character as Michael Scott. It’s important to have someone who can make everyone laugh.
And Winston Churchill. I’d love to hear first-hand how he approached leadership and decision-making during some of history’s most challenging moments.
It’s an eclectic mix, but I’m sure they’d all get on.
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
Warning: Values facts over hearsay and evidence over assumptions.
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
If I had to pick one figurehead, I’d say Jensen Huang, not for the hype, but because Nvidia’s position right now is the result of a very long, very patient bet that many people thought was wrong.
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