You talked about winning larger solutions customers, particularly in the first half. Can you give us any colour on the growth of your enterprise business?
We started in the midmarket. We’ve layered on new capabilities. We’ve become bigger. And that’s led us into being relevant for those large, complex and international customers over time. We’ve seen really strong growth there during the period, but the midmarket grew just as strongly. In the work we’re doing by adding GDT, by continuing to expand the capabilities, we think we’re improving our offering for both ends of the market.
You grew headcount grew 10.8% in your full year. Will the added use of AI agents dent your hiring rates at all?
You should expect to see our headcount continue to grow at similar rates to that which it has over the past few years.
We will continue to invest in people and technology. Over the last few years, we’ve grown our top line by 45 or 50% and our headcount by maybe 18 to 20%. You can see we’re leveraging technology to drive growth in GP per employee already very significantly.
We’re moving people from lower-value tasks into higher-value tasks as we automate. We’re putting new data analytics into their hands so they can take the offering to market in a more effective way.
All of those things are aimed primarily at driving top-line growth – we’re not looking to take cost out. We’re looking to continue to invest, but that is in both people and technology.
The growth of hyperscaler marketplaces was a prominent topic at Canalys Forums EMEA last week. How significant is that as a route to market for Softcat now?
It’s been a huge part of our business for two or three years now. I think we are the biggest marketplace reseller in Europe, or we’re certainly right up there. As we’ve said all along, it’s a very valid and important new distribution route for technologies in certain cases, depending on what the customer is doing, and also how vendors are choosing to host different products they’ve got as well.
Interview concludes on following page…
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