OBT “feels like ANS before PE got involved”, its CEO Paul Shannon asserted as he revealed the Microsoft partner he co-founded three years ago has reinvented itself as a midmarket data and AI specialist.
Shannon launched OBT Live in late 2023 after resigning as CEO of Manchester-based midmarket Microsoft partner ANS in the wake of its takeover by private equity firm Inflexion and subsequent merger with UKFast.
OBT Live originally started life with a laser focus on growing the market for Microsoft’s PlayFab LiveOps platform in the media and retail verticals.
But after acknowledging he was “slogging his guts out” for an idea that wasn’t working, Shannon revealed that ‘OBT Live’ has now been rebranded as ‘OBT’ and will focus on data and AI.
“It feels like ANS before PE”
OBT’s 13-employee team now includes several former ANS big hitters including Marketing Director Olivia Jaskolka, CSO Robin Lee and Operations Director Daniel Rebic.
“It just feels like ANS used to before PE got involved, and it makes you want to go to work every day put in the 50-60 hours a week in a startup mode – rather than just being like slogging your guts out for something that’s not working,” Shannon told IT Channel Oxygen.
Although it will go up against midmarket Microsoft partners including ANS, OBT will focus on smaller, quicker £50,000 to £150,000 data and AI projects to get its foot in the door with customers, Shannon revealed.
“We’d done quite a lot of data and AI integration work in the projects we did [as OBT Live], and I thought, ‘do you know what, there’s a market for a smaller, agile AI partner’,” Shannon said of OBT’s about-turn.
“We’re staying away from end-user Copilot deployments, which are not our bag, and the big discovery pieces. We’re trying to deliver really powerful use cases as quickly as we can, and then provide a managed service for the customers after it.
“We want to find that one critical, safe use case where at the end of it, the customer goes, ‘wow, this is really powerful; what else can we do’?
While some partners’ motto is ‘we’ll use any vendor you want; but it’s got to be Microsoft’, OBT is agnostic outside of the data layer (where it uses Microsoft exclusively), Shannon claimed.
Its arsenal of tools therefore includes Anthropic, which last week sensationally banned the use of its new Claude Fable 5 model among foreign nationals.
Despite characterising it as “unnerving”, Shannon said the move would not impact OBT’s customers.
“It’s quite rare for us to need the very latest model,” he explained.
“In fact, part of our value proposition is managing the cost of what we’ve delivered to the customer – and not just using the latest model for the sake of it.”
“Really, really tough”
This is in fact OBT’s second reinvention in its short history, Shannon revealed.
“We had some problems with a Canadian partner who’d written some software on top of PlayFab. They went bust, and it left us quite badly stranded – both financially and just with directionally with customers,” he said.
“So then we decided to pivot into writing our own version of software that can sit on top of it.
“To be frank, it was really, really tough from a sales perspective. We had a great team technically who could write the software. The software was great. It was just that it was in retail and media, which really wasn’t the heritage of ANS – they were two of the few commercial private sector sectors we didn’t work in, which made it particularly difficult.”
But OBT is already gaining traction with its favoured midmarket customers in its new guise, Shannon claimed.
“This is really working, and we’re having a whale of a time,” he concluded.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
