Technology Reseller talks to James Yates, Managing Director of Exertis Cloud, about key developments in 2024, including the launch of its new partner programme, and his priorities for 2025
Technology Reseller (TR): Please could you give me a quick overview of Exertis Cloud and your plans for 2025.
James Yates (JY): My remit when I came in 16 months ago was to develop the base that had been built by my colleagues and to really drive the cloud business forward. Exertis are relatively late to the party with cloud – we’re now in our third year of trading – but we’ve tried to turn that into an advantage.
I know the channel very well from being on the other side of the fence in the MSP world, and that has given me some insight into how we can build something that brings value to partners and a point of differentiation for vendors, because
I don’t think any of our vendor partners are looking for share shift. That’s pretty apparent; if anything, we are hearing from vendors that they want to manage fewer partners, whether that’s distributors or resellers/MSPs.
Over the last 12-15 months we’ve been restructuring the business, defining our proposition and building a team that can take that to market. We’re now just trying to accelerate that.
TR: How many team members do you have now?
JY: The core team is around 20, not counting ancillary departments that we plug into, like HR and finance. We have the benefit of the larger PLC business to support us; we are like an entrepreneurial start-up in a PLC. That’s very much the spirit of what we’re doing.
TR: How has Exertis Cloud grown over the last three years in terms of products, users and revenue?
JY: Obviously, we have started from a relatively low base, but our aspiration is to be a £100 million pound cloud business by the end of 2027, and we’re well on track to achieve that. Typically, we’re growing at between 20% and 30% year-on-year, with particular growth in our core vendors of Microsoft and Adobe.
Rather than being, as some of our competitors are, a marketplace where there is a plethora of cloud and SaaS vendors, we’re trying to keep it carefully curated and build out an ecosystem around our Microsoft core. Anything that we build in there is to migrate, to backup, to secure the core Modern Workplace or Azure workloads that we’re managing.
Then, with Adobe it’s about building from what was traditionally that Creative Cloud base with elements such as Document Cloud and Acrobat AI Assistant and some of the recent announcements made at Adobe MAX in the US.
We’re seeing a lot of things come together. There are commonalities, for example between AI Assistant and Copilot, and there’s a role for both to play, depending on budget and workload and application, so we’re trying to build an ecosystem.
You won’t find 30 different vendors. You’re more likely to find a dozen or so that have been hand-picked based on their technology and the margin opportunity.
Vendors have to offer a strong margin and market development opportunity for partners, underpinned by our internal expertise. We support everything we sell, rather than relying on the vendor to do that on our behalf. It’s almost a last resort to bring in a vendor for support
or enablement.
TR: Could you tell readers a bit more about your value proposition and how this is reflected in the Exertis Cloud team.
JY: I’ve spent 25 years in channel roles. I’ve worked in distribution, I’ve worked
in retail, I’ve worked in MSPs. Prior to joining Exertis, I was Commercial Director at Highlander, now FluidOne. We built a substantial cloud business there and I’ve been able to lean on some of that expertise at Exertis Cloud, as have other members of the team who followed me across or who came from other MSPs, distributors or vendors.
When I was on the other side of the fence and dealing with distribution, I sometimes felt there was a lack of understanding, a lack of empathy, just vendor messaging, unfiltered, passed straight through, without an obvious consequential message or value proposition for us. What is sometimes forgotten is that for an MSP, there has to be a margin opportunity but also a tangible business benefit for the end user, so when we built our value proposition, we had two personas in mind. One was the reseller, the MSP, who we sell to directly, and the other was the end-user business.
Probably about 14 or 15 months ago, not long after I came in, we sat down as a collective to work through what our value proposition was going to be, how we were going to differentiate ourselves, where we thought we were already winning and where we didn’t think that we could play as strongly.
We identified a huge expanse of SMB resellers that are somewhat unloved, not only by competitors that are more interested in the top 10% or 20% of players but also by some of the vendors, and we thought how can we support these people. Tapping into some of our experience, we built a value proposition around People, Platform and Profitability.
People – essentially having the right people, with one-to-one account management, pre-sales people and our own 24/7 UK-based helpdesk; Platform – no cloud business can perform without a platform and we think ours is one of the best, particularly when it comes to ease of integration with ERP systems and finance departments; and Profitability – this is what our Stratos partner program was born out of, and encapsulates where we think we can make a real difference, for SMBs in particular.
TR: When was Stratos introduced?
JY: It was launched officially in October, and we’ve already onboarded the first 20 partners.
We make a commitment that we will help partners grow faster and be more profitable working with Exertis Cloud than with our competitors, and the way we do that is partly through our carefully curated portfolio of vendors and partly through an ecosystem of alliance partners.
As a result we are able to offer Stratos partners things like Copilot Readiness Assessments that we can do on behalf of partners, giving them a blueprint that they can then scale. We work with a company called Noteworthy, made up of ex-Microsoft employees, which gives guidance on navigating Microsoft partner programs, specialisations and designations, as well as managing rebates. We partner with Fast Lane, one of Microsoft’s leading certified training partners, and will put people through MS-900, AZ-900 the AZ-104 certification. We have regular CloudConnect events, some in-person, enabling partners to interact with vendors face to face, and some on-demand, including webinars where we distil all the noise coming from vendors into the most relevant content.
The different things we have built into the Stratos Partner Program would normally be the preserve of businesses doing more than £100,000 a month in recurring revenue, so it really moves the dial for SMB resellers.
TR: As you say, Exertis came late to the cloud. What has prompted Exertis Cloud’s 500 partners to work with you?
JY: Obviously, we have the heritage of Exertis, which trades with around 8,000 resellers, so we have the advantage of being able to speak directly to resellers/ MSPs that have traded with other areas of Exertis.
Some partners come to us because they would otherwise not get the care and attention they get from us and our marketing activities; and sometimes it is because cloud has become quite commoditised elsewhere – often, it comes down to 1% point of differentiation on cost – and we’re trying to move away from that and have value-led conversations.
We appreciate we’re not always going to win with that, particularly in the mid- market and corporate space, but we’ve taken an active decision to double down on the value-added investments we make for that SMB partner channel, where we think it will resonate strongly.
TR: You’ve mentioned several challenges your partners face, including commoditisation. What topics come up most often in your conversations with resellers/MSPs?
JY: The rate of change – a lot of MSPs are still managing on-premises workloads and have customers that are somewhat slow to adopt new technologies; it can be challenging to find a realistic return on investment with AI; and there are so many programmatic changes with the likes of Microsoft that it is very, very difficult for them to manage licences, renewals and certifications; security is huge as well.
AI and security are a burden. Customers of all sizes are demanding help, but it can be challenging for resellers and MSPs to scale up and skill up to meet that demand and provide a return on investment. We’re the sole UK distributor for a new entrant to the UK market called ContraForce, which
last year won Microsoft’s Security ISV of the Year Award. They bring a managed MDR service to MSPs in that SMB space, which ties in very nicely with everything we do with Defender and Sentinel.
With managed and unmanaged versions, it takes away the onus on resellers to build out a SOC but gives them the ability to move to an unmanaged model should they get to the point where they are comfortable dealing with alerts and remediation themselves. Importantly, it gives them that first step on the ladder, because otherwise SIEM and SOC services are just too complex, too costly and out of reach for an SMB.
TR: AI is such an open-ended discussion that, it must be challenging for MSPs to scale and make money from those sorts of engagement.
JY: Absolutely. It’s about giving people tangible, real life business cases. That’s what we are trying to do with Copilot, because if the enablement isn’t done correctly people will summarise in PowerPoint and Teams, but they won’t get true value out of it. First and foremost, it is really important to make sure the data structure and security are in place, but then it is critical to address the enablement of the users. What we’re seeing with both Microsoft and Adobe is that AI genuinely is allowing people to move away from mundane, menial tasks and do something more productive and ultimately more satisfying. That process requires people being on board, which is why we’re trying to get it down to quite specific use cases.
TR: What other priorities do you have for 2025?
JY: We’ve established our team, the partner program and a proposition that is structured and programmatic that we can take out to partners consistently, so for us, it’s now about scaling, raising the profile of Exertis Cloud and explaining what we’re doing for SMBs, above and beyond what more established competitors are doing.
That’s the strategy. Tactically, we’re just embarking on a service with Microsoft, called the Cloud Migration Factory, where Microsoft engineers essentially migrate legacy workloads and infrastructure to Azure on behalf of SMB resellers, enabling them to keep their customers up-to-speed with digital transformation.
Microsoft is prioritising five key pillars this financial year, of which migrations is one. There’s a lot of focus on Copilot and security, but they recognize there’s a huge legacy base that they need to work on. That’s going to be something to keep an eye on. If we can get some momentum behind that, it could be quite exciting.
TR: What for you has been this year’s highlight?
JY: Trying not to sound too cheesy, it’s having the team in place with the right balance between distribution experience, partner experience and vendor experience. We brought the final leaders into the commercial team in October and being able to close out the year with that team in place, ready to hit the ground running in January is a real positive. We feel we’re in a really great position.
Be First to Comment