Outsourcery CEO outlines channel push

Following the ditching of its mobile business to Daisy this year to focus on the cloud, Outsourcery has clarified its strategy to strengthen its channel.
Speaking from the Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Worldwide Partner conference, co-CEO and co-founder Piers Linney feels they are starting a new phase in its business. “In March, we sold of the majority of the mobile business to become a pure play cloud service provider,” he explains. “[Previously] we were about a £45m business, now about a £15m but that is just in the cloud.”
The sale of its legacy mobile business, which had previously made it one of the largest Vodafone B2B partners in the UK, allowed the firm to plough a significant investment into cloud including datacentres, staff and infrastructure. “[Following the sale], we also restructured the company and we are now a channel focused business,” he adds.
The firm’s InPartnership channel programme now has three tiers in place and accreditation is set to follow later this year. However, certification will be based on commitment instead of just sheer revenue. “The ones that commit are the ones we will focus on,” claims Linney.
Partner search
The firm is looking for just 10 strategic partners and Linney highlights the recent deal with distributor Micro-P that will allow the distie to offer Outsourcery’s Unified Lync and Microsoft Hosted Exchange as part of a bundled offering through its partner and dealer network. The agreement with Micro-P will potentially add to the 250 resellers the firm currently has, and Linney admits that it could ultimately grow to “potentially thousands” of partners selling its commodity or “automated” parts of its cloud service.
“Anybody can launch a full service Outsourcery [platform]; we can white label anything we do,” he explains. “We have always been able to do it but since we redesigned the business into a more channel-led model, it is now more structured.” The firm has developed a number of standardised systems using tools such as Parallels to serve a growing number of local IT and comms resellers.
Although the CEO believes that Outsourcery is now 100 percent cloud, there is no illusion that the firm is multi-vendor. “Microsoft is what people ask us for and we think Microsoft will win the business cloud war,” he sates. “90 percent of business users, every morning booting up whatever device they have got, interact with Outlook and everything can integrate into that interface.”
True UC
The CEO feels that some of its new solutions such as advanced Microsoft Lync integration will be key to getting mass market adoption of the cloud. “[Lync] is true unified comms, not the stuff that people have been trying to cobble together for the last 10 year,” he comments, “Lync will be to business communication what Outlook was to email.”
Although the firm still has a direct touch sales team, “Our strategy is that the channel will always prevail as it has to,” claims Linney adding, “in this world, we have invested £15m in our cloud strategy and we need to pay for it. So the when the day comes that we don't need direct sales, we will look at it, but our direct sales guys do much larger deals, integration, hybrid clouds, 1000 days professional services... our channel partners are a long way from doing that.”