Comparex well on the road to meet managed service ambitions

Global Microsoft LAR Comparex is well down its road to becoming a fully-fledged managed service provider and is planning to expand its offerings this year.

The firm has been going through a transition over the last few years and continues to evolve the business as well as keeping its traditional software licensing operation running.

Richard Best joined the firm last September from Bytes as UK general manager and has come on board at a time when the business is looking to turn ambitions into actions and make sure that its plans deliver.

The firm has developed a global managed services division and rolled out a number of services including: cloud consumption monitoring, cloud platform management and software portfolio management.

"We want to provide that all round wrap for a customer. Take them to the cloud, help them manage it and help them manage the costs of it and support them technically," said Best.

This year should see more being added to that list, with security a key area identified as an opportunity where the firm can expand its activities.

"This year we have deployed a fully Azure managed service [coming to the UK in the late Summer]," he added "We are also bringing out security managed service and EMS."

Comparex has been developing the solutions and Best said that the firm had completely changed its mission to become a major global services player.

"All the staff understand that this is not a moment in time and we are going to go here briefly but this is the direction the company is going in long term," he added.

Looking down the line the company is keeping a close eye on AI and machine to machine to make sure it can keep on top of market developments.

Best said that position of Microsoft being so vocal about cloud and the support it had given partners around Azure had been a major benefit.

"In the past the conversation  has been here is a great reason to buy these licenses but what Microsoft wants is to say to the customer tell us about your business challenges and let's look at how the MS cloud stack can help you be a better performing business," he said.