Giacom possesses a “big point of difference” over rival cloud marketplaces, its CEO claimed, as he gave a progress report on its recent intY acquisition.
The £500m run rate revenue specialist channel marketplace super-charged its Microsoft licensing business in December when it acquired the UK&I partner business of intY from Scansource.
The move added £65m-£70m in revenues, 80-90 staff in Bristol, and over 1,200 MSP partners.
IntY’s partners have broadly welcomed the acquisition as a positive development, Giacom CEO Terry O’Brien said.
“We’ve not suffered any impacts in terms of partners saying ‘this isn’t for me’, and actually what we’ve seen is a lot of positivity around what being part of Giacom brings them.”
“That’s our point of differentiation”
The business launched the latest version of its platform ‘Cloud Market’ last July as it rebranded its entire business under the Giacom banner. It billed this as the first phase in “creating an Amazon-esque experience for the channel”.
But with rival marketplaces including ALSO Cloud and Pax8 also expanding swiftly, what is Giacom’s pitch to MSPs?
“I certainly like what Pax8 are doing globally – I admire their global footprint,” O’Brien said.
“The big point of difference for our platform is that we aren’t just an IT software or hardware shop. SMBs are increasingly demanding a true one stop shop from their partners. You can come to Giacom’s platform and expand your breadth of portfolio across mobile and fixed telecoms and UCaaS as well as your more traditional IT software and hardware services. And of course, we will help you not only to broaden your portfolio but also support you to build the depth of skills to do this credibly. That’s what’s very different about us. I don’t see anybody else doing that at the minute.”
“[Giacom COO] Nathan Marke and I talk about the rise of the MSP all the time and how the UK channel of tech resellers, comms resellers and cloud resellers are progressively merging over time, whether organically or through M&A,” O’Brien added.
“I see them heading in that direction faster than ever, and that’s our point of differentiation.
“The way the channel’s going, somebody needs to be the marketplace to procure the best-of-breed services across all that tech. That’s where we’re different.”
“The platform experience is becoming market leading”
Giacom is in the process of rolling out the latest version of its platform, with 500 of Giacom’s 6000 partners already migrated.
“There are some areas where we’re trying to accelerate development to increase the range of features offered and provide even greater partner benefits,” O’Brien said.
“Cloud Market is constantly evolving to meet partner needs, and we are investing heavily to make sure that across our platform it’s as feature rich as anybody else’s.
“The platform experience is becoming market leading.
“I think over the next two to three months we’ll have that across all our partners.”
“We wanted more scale and skills with Microsoft”
Turning back to the intY acquisition, O’Brien said Giacom is now looking to build out its Bristol site and make it a centre of excellence for sales and commercial activities.
The acquired business specialises in not only Microsoft services, but also security and back-up.
“It’s a really good team – there’s a really great partner ethic there and strong commercial structure,” O’Brien said.
“Fundamentally, the rationale for doing this was that we see Microsoft as front and centre of the ecosystem going forward, where partners own that service and then start to pull through all the really margin-rich comms, connectivity, professional and managed services.
“We wanted to add more scale and skills [with Microsoft]. Scale is important in our position in the market and that’s why intY was such a great fit, bringing scale, new partners and perhaps most importantly lots of brilliant cloud skills.”
Despite the doom and gloom, Giacom continues to grow at double digits organically, O’Brien claimed.
“I think the need small businesses have for a strategic partner becomes more prevalent when things get a bit tough. We’re only growing at that level because our partners are winning business and growing,” he concluded.
This article was produced in association with Giacom and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
