What to do if your IT supplier gets acquired?

08 March 2018

With all the news around high street stores going wobbly, it’s inevitable that the broader business world will start to see changes in structures and opportunistic mergers, acquisitions or company failures will occur. In the IT space this has been happening for a number of years, with such a fragmented marketplace it is inevitable that companies will struggle, and others will thrive, but this change can mean disruption and pain for the client base.

The fortunate situation is that most IT or Telecoms companies that are acquired have ongoing revenues which, in most cases, are the reason why they are appealing for an acquisition from other players. Even if the business is really struggling, the lure of ongoing revenues and broader customer base is a good reason for a bigger more stable company to buy them. As a client therefore, your bills are the reason why your IT or Telecoms supplier might be acquired - which puts you in a great place to leverage the situation to your advantage.

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The future of Distribution and the broader Channel

06 February 2018

An fantastic report by IT Europa on behalf of the Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC) was published this week. It walked through where it sees the role of Distribution in an increasingly challenging IT Supply Chain, and came up with some interesting conclusions.

Distribution is much maligned by the broader IT Supply Chain. Customers don’t know it exists, resellers and service providers look down their nose at them, and Vendors abuse their services at every possible opportunity. However, Distribution could hold the key to some stability in a turbulent world, and IT Europa have defined how this could work.

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Review : Accenture Tech Vision 2018

27 February 2018

I’m a proud alumni of Accenture, having worked for them as my first “proper” job and learnt enormous amounts about life in that period. They are a company that recruit very talented people (like me, obviously) and trust them to do stuff culturally which drives innovation. Clearly its been 15+years since I worked there, but I class a lot of my ex-colleagues as friends and still admire the brand and approach.

Because of my alumni status, I was invited to an overview webinar of their tech vision report (Technology Vision 2018), published recently, which I thought I’d share on the basis that it actually put a slightly different emphasis on tech trends that a lot of the tech companies publish.

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The Accidental Procurement Manager

24 January 2018

Interesting discussion with a prospective client last week. They are a mid-market business with a handful of people in IT, who have outsourced some of their infrastructure to a hosting company. Their contract is up for renewal, and they need to find an alternative supplier, but they are struggling to find a suitable supplier and balance this against their incumbent who is perceived to be under-performing. Not an unreasonable set of requirements, but triggered a thought process in my mind regarding procurement as a skill set.

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