With Andrew Carr, Managing Director, Camwood
With almost 25 years’ experience in enterprise IT and managed services, Camwood is
a leading IT consultancy that supports digital acceleration through the assessment, modernisation and management of applications.
It offers a range of services, from application audits and optimisation to large-scale migrations and ongoing lifecycle management, with a particular focus on application compatibility when migrating to Microsoft Windows 11, Azure Virtual Desktop and Intune.
As well as creating tailored solutions to meet customers’ specific challenges, Camwood has developed solutions of its own. Its first automated product, App-DNA, was sold to Citrix systems back in 2011 and since then the company’s technology incubation team has launched several stand-alone businesses, including Rimo3, NexBotix and Infinity.
Last month, Camwood added another string to its bow with the announcement of a partnership with data analytics specialist Pentaho. As part of a master service agreement with the Hitachi subsidiary, it will be bringing the Pentaho data analytics platform to market via new managed data services covering data assessments, migration to optimised storage and ongoing management. As well as saving time and money, locating and organising data can help businesses deal with FOI and data requests more quickly and prepare them to make better use of emerging technologies, such as AI.
Here, Andrew Carr gives his view from the channel.
Technology Reseller (TR): How’s business? Better or worse than 12 months ago? And how confident are you about the future?
Andrew Carr (AC): Business is good, and probably on a par with about 12 months ago, which is very positive news for us. Our market is prone to fluctuations depending on when technology refresh cycles happen, but we’re beginning to approach a busy period.
On October 14, 2025, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or technical support for Windows 10, so we’re looking forward to helping our customers migrate their applications over to Windows 11 and ensuring they don’t fall prey to incompatibility issues that could create inefficiencies or downtime.
We’re also building out our partnership with Pentaho, a data services business, to help customers achieve data fitness. This involves getting ready for AI and organising data in a way that’s usable.
TR: In what areas are you experiencing strongest demand?
AC: In the last month or so, we’ve started to see a lot of organisations prepare themselves for this new technology refresh cycle, and we’re now involved in lots of Windows 11 readiness planning projects, looking specifically at devices and applications and taking the appropriate action to ensure compatibility with the new operating system.
We’re also seeing high demand for our application modernisation services. Part of our specialism is helping customers only migrate what they need to. We also undertake user acceptance testing to check that the application works as expected on the new operating system. After migration, we offer a managed service to make sure application estates remain up-to-date, secure and working as needed.
TR: What recent wins are you most proud of?
AC: We have been involved in two standout projects recently. We proudly secured the business of a large global engineering organisation with about 65,000 users, which involved a consultative approach around the end-to-end processes and life of an application. We’re currently providing recommendations on those processes, which cover a request right the way through to it being delivered and managed, to help them achieve new efficiencies.
The other exciting development was the phase one completion of a project with a global financial services business for about 6,000 users. This involved our team looking at their legacy, on-premises applications to see how they can be moved to a more modern cloud-based work environment.
TR: Where is business proving most difficult?
AC: It’s impossible to influence our customers’ buying and decision-making processes. That may sound obvious, but there’s now definitely more rigour and governance around our target market’s decision-making process than in previous years.
That’s understandable due to the difficult macro environment and the fact that numerous departments are fighting for a chunk of the same budget, which is typically lower than it used to be. Of course businesses want to ensure they get the best return on any investment, so we have stepped up our efforts to justify our services and help our main contacts write a business case to achieve that all- important buy-in.
TR: How have you changed/are you changing business operations to exploit new opportunities?
AC: Over the last 12-15 months, our team has done a lot of work automating BAU repeatable processes, which essentially refers to the applications that support a company’s operations on a day-to-day basis. This enables us to onboard more customers without necessarily having to bring in additional resource and makes our business much stronger in the long-term.
We’ve also ventured into data services with our partnership with Pentaho. We’re helping customers organise their data so they have a dependable, accurate and single source of truth for compliance and audit purposes. This also helps our clients achieve quick ROI and cost savings, with an easily accessible source of AI-ready and labelled data that can be used to draw insight and meaningful conclusions for those big business decisions.
TR: How is AI impacting your business now and likely to impact your business in the future?
AC: We are actively looking into AI use cases and working out how we can incorporate and embed AI directly into our operations to make it easier for our people to access resources that make them more efficient.
That said, I think it’s important for people to remember that AI isn’t a silver bullet that can immediately solve everything. We know that if businesses are to exploit the opportunities presented by AI, underlying data needs to be usable, accessible and in a position to allow AI-driven algorithms to accurately learn from it. The key message is that the ship needs to be in order before organisations spend significant sums on AI-driven solutions.
TR: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing channel businesses today?
AC: It’s a twofold challenge. There are so many different vendors trying to compete for wallet share inside an organisation that it becomes a question of priorities. It’s vital to focus on specific outcomes that give the best return for the business.
The second biggest challenge is more from a global vendor point of view and that’s the danger of over-simplifying quite complex technologies. AI isn’t an out-of-the-box solution, it takes time and planning to get right. Alongside use cases that can help them internally, the channel needs to define specific problem statements for customers so that they can make the most of the power of AI.
TR: Could vendors and distributors do more to help overcome these challenges? And if so, what?
AC: Personally, I think that over the last five years or so vendors and distributors have really focused on engagement and have put a lot more value at the front of the sales cycle, with access to content, resources and additional technical support, rather than at the end which was the traditional stage of engagement for further support. They are now helping to drive some of those conversations at the very beginning and finding out how to solve customer challenges from the outset. I think that is quite a marked shift in the industry and is proving to be a positive step forward.
TR: If you could change one aspect of your job, what would it be and why?
AC: Ideally, I would like to spend 100% of my time with our customers and partners, helping them solve their challenges. That’s the most rewarding and engaging part of my job, and it’s those relationships that last for years. The problem then would be working out which tasks to drop, because they all need to be done!
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