Channel Focus: Vin Murria
Advanced already has 88 percent of NHS Trusts taking one or more of its products (front and back office) and the depth of its management and analytics systems covers out-of-hospital applications including urgent and unplanned care, district nursing, hospices, residential care homes, telehealth, end-of-life and long-term-condition management, as well as mobile information systems for community carers.
The firm has gone from zero to in excess of £92m revenue in under two years although the figure is flattering as smart acquisitions built a lot of the value. Pickups like accounting software firm COA Solutions (which includes the highly regarded document management firm Version One) brought depth to the portfolio that now makes Advanced potentially one of the best end-to-end suppliers of IT to the NHS.
Although the firm does not have the brand recognition of some of its much larger rivals, it is not tainted by failure and many of its partners are respected at the local level by delivering projects that have worked over many years. Murria believes that the channel is critical not just for Advanced but to make fundamental improvements in how IT works within the NHS.
Self Serving
“There were a lot of the solutions that were already in place – why fix something that was already fixed?” she asks, pointing to systems like Lorenzo which replaced existing systems but offered little added value. Murria hints that much of the overspend was potentially self serving for the system integrators, building the systems that were only marginal improvements with the aim of generating revenue rather than innovating.
Advanced now has around 50 partners but Murria is not trying to recruit all and sundry to join up: “We are happy to talk to anybody but we are looking for partners with specific domain expertise and a existing user base that can grow.
“Our partner selection is no different from a customer choosing a supplier,” Murria comments. “It’s a long term relationship – in many ways it’s like a marriage. In the end, it’s not what you say, it’s what you do!” she quips. Consequently, Advanced pursues active partner qualification and will routinely turn down potential partners if there is no long term prospect.
Cloud
Unlike many of her peers, Murria is not a cheerleader for the growth of cloud computing. “How many people actually want it [now]?” she questions. “If you look at salesforce.com – it only has three percent market share.” But Murria believes there will be a move to SaaS, although her opinion is that the industry is pushing it more than customers are actually demanding the requirement.
But Murria is no Luddite; Advanced already hosts more than 100 NHS websites and the firm’s portfolio of products are available as on premise and hosted. The Group also manages several of its customers’ cloud environments directly using public cloud platforms such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Murria is also aware of the potential of alienating the channel with direct touch cloud offerings: “The channel is a great route to market – if we do managed services, it will increasingly be with the channel,” she notes.
Towards the end of this year, the new government will hopefully solidify its strategy around how the NHS will be running its budgets for probably the next decade. Advanced has aligned itself to be a dominant supplier, although relatively small now with an Enterprise value of around £150m, the focus on the channel and a product portfolio that reaches across many key requirements sets it up as one to watch in the space.
