Matthew Parker has revealed his next move after stepping down as Babble CEO.
In a LinkedIn post (see bottom), Parker announced he resigned as CEO last week after growing the cloud comms player from £6m to £100m-plus revenues.
He joined Babble in 2016, rebranding it from ‘Solutions IP’ in 2019 because he “didn’t like the term ‘solutions’”.
The London-based outfit made 34 acquisitions on his watch in an M&A spree supported by successive PE backers LDC and Graphite.
During Parker’s tenure, Babble was heavily involved in raising money for motor neurone disease (MND) charity My Name’5 Doddie Foundation, via its involvement in Ride Across Britain (see below).
Asked about his next move by IT Channel Oxygen, Parker said he will spend the next six months focusing on an MND fundraising and awareness project (specifically linked to ‘My Name’5 Doddie’ and Rob Burrow).
“More on business after the summer,” he added.
“We did something remarkable”
As recently as 18 months ago, Parker harboured aspirations to grow Babble into the “first £1bn-revenue cloud services provider in the UK”.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen in August 2023, the straight-talking CEO said he felt there would be “bigger transactions” among the market’s “six horsemen” (Babble, Southern Communications, Arrow Business Communications, Wavenet, Focus Group and Onecom), adding that “I expect us to be part of that”.
He was at least half right, with Wavenet lighting up the market by acquiring similar-sized peer Daisy Corporate Services last summer.
In his LinkedIn post (see below), Parker acknowledged that 2024 “has been about consolidation” for the London-based outfit.
It was “time for a change – for me and the business”, Parker wrote, adding that he was “leaving it in [chairman] Mark Braund’s capable hands to manage the transition”.
“I joined a small telecom’s reseller in February 2016 with 16 people, 10 of whom are still with the business today, with £6m revenue serving 200 customers from an office in London,” Parker wrote.
“We sat down together that day and said we were going to do something remarkable, and that is exactly what we did.”
In a statement to IT Channel Oxygen, a Babble representative said:
“After nine years as CEO of Babble, one of the UK’s largest cloud technology solution providers with over 15,000 customers nationwide, Matthew Parker has decided to step down.
“Our Chair, Mark Braund, has taken on the role of Executive Chair, assisted by CTO Andy Lindsell and CFO Alex Clark, to lead what is an exceptional management team into the next phase of the Company, where our focus is to enhance our customers’ experience, helping them maximise the value of their IT spend and deliver cloud-based solutions that make a genuine difference to their business.“
