Neil Murphy has taken up a non-exec post at Convergent Technology, an “exciting young” reseller he says reminds him of his early days at Bytes.
Founded in 2017, London-based Convergent ranked 183rd in Oxygen 250 2025.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, former Bytes Technology Group CEO Murphy revealed he had been acting as a “sounding board” to Convergent’s board for around a year.
Murphy abruptly left £2bn-sales Bytes Technology Group last February, having led it through a period of frenetic growth and its 2020 stock market flotation. He spoke more about the circumstances behind his departure last May.
“Having tested myself in a large-corporate environment, I’m going back to my roots – because when I joined Bytes in 1997 it was roughly the same size as Convergent is,” Murphy said.
“They’re an exciting young company.
“My role as a NED is as a sounding board to [directors] Jody [Pawson], Pete [Fewster] and Mike [Bain], working with them on their strategy and growth plans and teasing out some changes they can make.”
Pawson said Murphy is among the “few people I respect who shares an understanding of where we begun”.
“A lot of the decisions we’ve made have been influenced by Neil,” Pawson said.
“It’s a smaller, exciting company and is maybe a bit like his days at the beginning with Bytes. It’s something he can sink his teeth into,” Pawson said.
“Fairly simple in what it does”
Murphy characterised Convergent as a value-added reseller that had grown up focusing on providing hardware including servers and storage.
“But it delivers an increasingly large revenue of services tailored around things like rollouts of hundreds of laptops and servers to different locations,” he said.
“It’s picked up quite a lot of business because of its flexibility,” Murphy added.
“I was recently talking to one of the sales guys who’d just got back from New York, where they’ve rolled out new technology to a UK-based insurance company who’s opening offices in the US.
“They weren’t expecting to pick up the business. But because they’d dug that customer out of a hole to get [a European] job done, the customer said ‘blimey, this isn’t a level of responsiveness we’d get from the larger VARs – here’s a chunk of business’.
“Convergent is fairly simple in what it does. If its clients are asking them for services they haven’t historically provided, they’ll go out and find the capability to deliver those services.”
“The pool is getting smaller and smaller”
According to numbers it split out for us, Convergent turned over £26.4m in its fiscal 2024 and employs around 40 staff.
It has headroom for further growth after a year spent investing in its systems, Pawson said.
This includes rolling out a NetSuite system and boosting its processes, procedures and vendor management capabilities, he said.
“For the next 5-10 years, we’re in a position where we just need people,” Pawson said.
Convergent sees itself as a “modern reseller” that provides “a curated platform of services and capability that can operate globally, but with a personalised level of service”, Pawson said.
“Our aim is always to try and nail that,” he said.
A recent spate of M&A involving midmarket resellers has opened up a gap in the competitive landscape for Convergent, Pawson claimed.
“The pool is getting smaller and smaller for clients’ perspective suppliers due to acquisitions,” he said.
“If a client’s going to buy from SCC, Computacenter, Softcat, Bytes and Advania, they’re all different culturally, but they’re all large organisations and often it’s a struggle to get things done at the pace people need today.
“Either this is an amazing opportunity for us, or we’ve got it completely wrong.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
