What’s your number-one priority for the second half?
To deliver great outcomes for customers in a world where their IT infrastructure needs to get stronger, more resilient, more capable and more flexible than ever before, whilst they’re dealing with some of these price challenges and other factors going on as well.
Having mooted potential North American M&A in October, you didn’t mention North America once in the H1 results commentary. Is there an update on the international expansion strategy?
We haven’t dialled up or down our interest in that. It’s just that the work’s ongoing and there’s nothing new to say.
In your results commentary, you said Softcat has “never been more relevant”, and linked this partly to demand for AI. The AI spending boom has so far largely bypassed the channel, but is this changing?
I agree that there’s been huge investment in AI infrastructure but that the vast majority of that has gone into the hyperscalers. And the vast majority of that is bought direct.
But what we’ve always said is that this will create demand in local environments for customers as well.
And it isn’t just about data centres. This is about the devices, the networks, the security, the orchestration layers to bring these AI agents together and so on. As user cases become clearer, as the public cloud is used to develop those agents and use cases, then the demands that creates on all parts of infrastructure feeds into the channel.
We are starting to see the effects of that on the channel.
I am very clear on how Softcat can add more value than ever to customers as things get more complex and bigger and as prices become more dynamic.
We are thinking two things will happen.
More and more complicated infrastructure needs more support from us, and the tools we can use to deliver those outcomes for customers are improving rapidly because of AI too.
I think this is the beginning of a golden age for capable channel partners to help customers and vendors grow.
And that’s why I think Softcat, with the investment we’ve made and capability we’ve got – the customer service and relationships we have, the proprietary data around our customers environments, the reach into all sorts of vendors’ roadmaps, the skills and service offering – it’s a really powerful package for what’s about to happen in the infrastructure space over the coming years.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
