You’ve been permanent CEO for just over a year. What’s the biggest change you’ve made?
Doubling down on the staff and thinking about the next five years and beyond.
We’ve expanded office space. We’ve opened up in Portsmouth, we’ve expanded the London office and we’ve bought the adjacent-to buildings in our Leatherhead business park to cater for future expansion.
I’ve got my eyes on a very ambitious growth target for the next few years, and we’re planning accordingly.
VMware has been taking big customers direct and raising prices. But you name-checked it as one of your key vendors. Is it fair to say that some of VMware’s larger partners have actually done okay from the whole furore?
I concur. We’ve had a good year with VMware. It was a bit of a surprise to me, if I’m honest. 18 months ago, I might have predicted that VMware was on the slide. But it’s been a very robust year and we were highly engaged with them. So our sentiment towards them is quite positive at the moment.
Softcat made its first-ever acquisition last month. How likely is it that BTG will acquire in the next 12 months?
We’ve talked publicly about the fact that it’s not an immediate priority. We’re organically growing with our technical staff and accreditations.
What we have done is taken time to look at opportunities. We’re very patient. The acquisitions we’ve done in the past have been very high quality – Phoenix was the last one the group did – and we’ve set the bar very high. We will continue to look, but we’re not going to do anything just for the sake of it. We’ve got a long, strong track record and any activity, if we were to contemplate it, has to be accretive.
If you had a magic wand, what would you change about the business?
If Trump could just wake up and act normally, that would help tremendously. Every business leader on this planet would love that. We just need a little bit more certainty.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
