Mark Sproson (pictured), newly appointed country manager for UK and Ireland is optimistic about the coming year and aims to add channel partners using his expanded ecosystem. “I’m not looking for revolutionary changes, but we have good growth expectations - the right sort of growth.”
The partners he has include some of long standing and commitment. “We need to add more partners to the organisation. With the newly expanded relationships with Lenovo globally which are especially successful in Europe, we aim to get their partners on board. This will allow us to reach a part of the market we have not been in before,” he says.
With an injection of funds from Lenovo with which the aim is to increase staff globally by 100 – there will be incremental investment in resources. Ian Smith has been promoted to Technical Manager EMEA from 2019, and Scale is are recruiting additional resource in Europe and this will follow through to the UK&I.
“Working with distributor CMS gives us extra reach across both countries; we are very much using them to identify partners, and we will identify partners who want a simplified message. We want to add numbers and reach, and look at those that fit the business, and those partners involved with customers where edge computing is a necessity - where localised compute is required and cloud is not appropriate.”
“We could do far more in Ireland and regions such as Scotland and elsewhere in England. We are well short of saturation. So we will identify partners and coverage aiming at those organisations whose IT will be stretched next year – which is almost anyone.”
Adoption is broadening, he says and will build on this. “Scale has done a good job in recent times in being a publicist; we are looking to use existing customers and create some interesting case studies and video sessions. If we don’t have the right presence in the marketplace, then customers and partners won’t know about it.”
There is still an element of specialisation in many channel structures, there is definitely an opportunity to reach further into partner organisations with data responsibility.
“We will be identifying the organisations where we think we may have a fit, and approach them either directly, through CMS, or Lenovo. We can distil the Scale Computing message and put it to them and see if there is a fit. There will be a period of selection. “
For 2019 – there is an issue of confidence with some customer who are being cautious and making what-if plans. But there has been a long period with customers putting off decisions. “They are now finding that maintenance costs are rising and assets have been “sweated” for additional periods. They now realise that investments have to be made. Some are still paralysed, but the partners’ and vendors’ responsibility is to take them along the process. If you don’t make a change, your business will not grow based on what you are doing now.”
Scale’s message has always been to reduce complexity and infrastructure layers in order to reduce overheads – let the customer get on with doing what it does best.
