Four top UK industry leaders faced off at Channel Chat Live last night, with Computacenter CEO Mike Norris providing one of the event’s tongue-tingling moments when he admitted “we probably underpay our UK salesforce”.
Here we round up 13 spicy soundbites from the event, which was compered by Robertson Sumner MD Marc Sumner at the Samsung KX and attended by 150 business owners and senior leaders from the tech industry.
The panellists:
Miriam Murphy, President, EMEA, TD Synnex
Mike Norris, CEO, Computacenter
Steve Rigby, Co-CEO, Rigby Group
Adele Every, MD for Public Sector at Cisco UK&I
Mild heat
Medium heat
Fairly hot
Mouth on fire
Permanent taste bud damage
We’ve provided a handy Scoville rating by each comment to show who really got the audience’s lips burning, so keep a coolant on standby.
Spicy soundbite 1:
“We’re in this very early stage of not really knowing where AI will go. There’s no doubt AI is critical for customers, but I think it’s going to be small language models, not large language models, that will make the real difference.”
Rigby said what most people in the room were thinking by admitting “we don’t know what’s happening in reality” with AI (despite Rigby Group being an investor in AI stocks including OpenAI and Anthropic). “The model we have today isn’t sustainable as the compute costs too much,” he noted.
Spicy soundbite 2:
“My feel is we focus too much on AI and then lose sight of what customers are trying to achieve.”
Every questioned whether the industry is getting carried away on AI. “I’m excited about AI – Cisco is investing $1bn in AI start ups for a very good reason. But let’s keep focus on what our customers want,” she added.
Spicy soundbite 3:
“It’s been fascinating to watch NVIDIA in the last 48 hours. Is the bubble about to burst?
Norris said that Computacenter is getting “ridiculous orders for ridiculous kit” on AI, but warned that “this can’t last”. He questioned whether NVIDIA has been overhyped in the same way Cisco was before the dotcom crash. Norris also admitted he is concerned that AI will lead to more UK jobs moving offshore. “I worry that if scripting becomes important that India wins and the UK loses… that’s a scary thought for the industry,” he said.
Spicy soundbite 4:
“We can’t avoid them and we have to embrace the change that’s happening.”
Rigby said partners like SCC have to embrace hyperscaler marketplaces, citing estimates that they will eventually grow to encompass 20-30% of the market.
Spicy soundbite 5:
“The way they treated the channel hasn’t surprised me or anybody else, I don’t think. The way they treated the end-user customer has surprised me, because they haven’t been particularly pleasant to them either.”
Norris was quick to stick the boot in when Sumner asked for the panel’s view on Broadcom.
Spicy soundbite 6:
“I think it’s a very aggressive financial engineering approach they’re doing. It’s going to make money for them for sure. But could they have made more money long term by maintaining and developing VMware? Personally I think they would have done.”
Rigby also refused to pull his punches on VMware. He characterised the takeover as a “risk and opportunity” for the channel. Although partners can help customers do something different with Nutanix or Red Hat, “there are some VMs you can’t remove” meaning Broadcom is in a “strong position today until new technologies arrive,” Rigby commented.
Spicy soundbite 7:
“I won’t pretend it’s not challenging and difficult”
Murphy conceded that as a big VMware partner, she is “singing from the inside and outside right now”. “We’re trying to do the best we can to minimise [the impact] and support the partner community,” she added.
Spicy soundbite 8:
“Sales people are at the top of the value chain”
Every shrugged off suggestions that sales people are overpaid in a world where clients are increasingly selecting their own hardware and software before they’ve even talked to a supplier. “Sales people are the visionaries and the front line. In a world of AI, our customers are looking for connections, partnerships and social value, and I would say the salesperson is at the top of that value chain,” she responded.
Spicy soundbite 9:
“We probably underpay our UK salesforce”
Norris may be inundated with requests for payrises this morning after dropping this bombshell – but the point he was making was about the contrasting motivations of Computacenter’s UK and US sales staff. “I go to the US and some of my best and brightest account managers say ‘I never, ever want any promotion for that, I just want loads of money’. I don’t see that very often in the UK,” he said. “I’ve got 25% of my salesforce in North America on zero base… they just want money…I’m not the highest paid person in Computacenter’; in fact, I don’t think I’m in the top five. So I believe [the UK salesforce] are underpaid. My people in the UK are a lot more ‘where’s my career going’ than in the US.”
Spicy soundbite 10:
“Do I think we’ve lost experience in the business because of the pursuit of diversity and inclusion? Absolutely not; I don’t believe that at all.”
Murphy rebuffed an impish question on DEI from Sumner, pointing out that the sector is “still very, very poor” when it comes to diversity stats. “The buying and decision-making community is more diverse, and we absolutely need to be more diverse,” she added.
Spicy soundbite 11:
“Looking around this room, I think there’s still work to do”
Every produced a true mic drop moment as she gestured to the largely white, male audience when asked whether industry DEI efforts should be dialled back in.
Spicy soundbite 12:
“No, not a chance”
Norris also rebuffed any notion that the industry has “over-rotated” on DEI, acknowledging that meritocracy doesn’t work if it selects only white males. “You need quotas, you need targets like making sure there’s a female in the last three. You need that, otherwise the meritocracy doesn’t work,” he added.
Spicy soundbite 13:
“The UK is about to become, rather than the sick man of Europe, the healthy man of Europe”
Rigby claimed the UK will be in a “pretty good position” if the government comes out with a pro-business budget on 30 October. “If you’re a risk taker, wealth creator, entrepreneur, if you’ve got guts and see opportunities, I hope from next year we should be in a better place. I don’t see it in the channel yet but… I think we’ll see a good 2025 onwards,” Rigby added.
