Role: Managing Director, Phoenix Software
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Achieving £1bn GII along with welcoming our 500th employee.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026
Building on our heritage and focusing exclusively on the UK public sector – it’s never faced more pressure with budgets, devolution and mergers, and we intend to be the partner that helps it through.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
Listening to my Oura ring, it is eating too late!
As leader of Phoenix, it is my responsibility to ensure the resilience and security of our business, so that our 600 colleagues can sleep at night knowing their roles, and their families’ futures, are secure.
Is AI being over-hyped?
It depends on what you’ve read and who you’ve believed. At Phoenix, we kept it real from the start. We went all-in with Microsoft Copilot across the business, but paired it with adoption change management programmes to make sure we embedded it the right way, for the right reasons – step by step.
We’ve taken our customers through the same journey: secure data and infrastructure have to be in place before the AI ‘icing on the cake’ can take effect. When that foundation is right, the impact is a genuine step change – with clearly defined outcomes and expectations to match.”
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
I feel like I’m being asked to pick a favourite child – but the one generating the most excitement right now is Licensing IQ, our automated peer-checking tool for Microsoft licensing. As the channel partner with the largest number of Microsoft Enterprise Agreements in the UK, getting those right matters enormously. It’s delivered real efficiencies for our Licensing Team, but more than that it’s surfaced insights and analytics that simply weren’t as accessible as before.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
It will be nearer than five years, but I do believe how we measure consumption will change from devices/user to measurement of business outcomes – so 20% faster processing or 40% fewer support tickets.
Partners will move from selling products and people to selling outcomes, with ‘Frontier Firms’ being the winners as AI is embedded across organisations.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
If you’d asked me a few years ago, I’d have said my phone or my laptop but now it’s Copilot. It’s become a bit like a second brain for me, it finds things, connects dots, and saves me from having to remember everything myself, which, given how busy things get, is probably for the best.
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
Just three? Jürgen Klopp would be first through the door – a leader who proved that sustainable success comes not from ego but from culture, from bringing every person in the building along with you and making them believe they’re capable of something extraordinary. The results speak for themselves, but it’s the way he achieved them that I find most compelling. Mary Wollstonecraft would be next; she was championing female social and educational equality back in 1792, and I’d love to discuss how much – and how little – has changed in 230 years. And to lighten the mood, Sarah Millican. I think she and Mary would get on brilliantly.
I’m also sneaking in George Michael as the evening’s entertainment. Non-negotiable.
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
Redhead approaching.
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
An obvious one, but Jensen Huang. To be respected from your engineering peers, a visionary who is able to turn that vision into a multi-billion business model, and continues to invent, re-invent, never standing still.
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