Logicalis primed to support customer demand for innovation

One of the themes of this year is the decision by some channel players to consolidate operations with the aim of supporting efficiencies and introducing a simplified management structure.

Logicalis is one business that falls into that category, having pulled together its Ireland, UK and Channel Islands operations under one centre of excellence banner in the summer, with the aim of becoming more responsive. The business has acted on that move as it enters the second half of its fiscal year.

The management team led by Alex Louth, Logicalis UK & Ireland regional CEO, includes some relatively recently added faces, including chief technology officer Mark Benson who joined the business around a year ago.

Louth talked about the announcement in July to unite operations as something that had been a while in the making and was about supporting growth. “It’s about widening our scope and our ability to support our customers,” he said. “It makes perfect sense for us as a business, and it’s fantastic. [I’ve] been able to really get in to collaborate with some of the [other teams].”

The experience of the pandemic, with the wholesale shift to video-based collaboration, has also helped the business remain connected, and that situation looks likely to be the norm going forward.

“I’ve been in the business a year so I think we’ve all become used to the fact that we can work in these remote locations, we all collaborate in the same way. I think the pandemic, and the way that we now approach work, helps that sort of bringing everything together because it’s the new norm,” said Benson.

The other ambition behind the decision to pull activities together is to give the market a clear idea of what the firm stands for and can deliver. Like many in the channel, perceptions swirl around Logicalis, including trusted advisor, systems integrator, managed service provider and value-added reseller.

“By evolving our go-to-markets to be more business-centric, to have a business conversation around [the topics that matter to customers, distributors and vendors], we took guidance as to what the trends were in the market from analysts and yourselves. We reformulated our go-to-markets around topics that were relevant to the organisations we support,” he said.

Those conversational topics included the journey to cloud, data management and cradle-to-grave management of data, but also unlocking the value of data and workforce transformation.

“We’ve repositioned ourselves as we like to say proudly that ‘we’re a global IoT [internet of things] solution and service provider’. It’s a global reach for that local touch, so we service that UK and Ireland market, but we have the capability to call upon the 27 countries that we work with in the larger Logicalis group, so it’s an exciting time and those go-to-markets will be reflected into the Irish markets and into the Channel Islands,” said Benson.

Logicalis recently shared the results of a CIO survey, revealing that investments were being made in technologies that support more flexible working.

“They’re starting to invest in some of the foundational stuff they’ll need to go forward,” he added. “We’re seeing investments in innovation, and that came out in the CIO survey, because the demands of customers are definitely changing, and the expectations of customers are definitely changing.

“The investment in innovation is going to go into supporting how the clients want to engage with these businesses going forward, and there’s been a lot of lessons learned there, but also from a user experience perspective,” Benson added.

“We’re all going to see massive evolution around the way we work, and the investments in that space are going to continue at least for the next couple of years, and security will be a massive area of investment there because the threat vector changed.”