SCC sets course on defining DSSP evolution

SCC has set its sights on establishing itself as a digital services player, with last week’s acquisition of Nimble a key plank of that strategy.

The channel player has seen customers work increasingly with digital consultants to advise them on their adoption of more services and technologies, and has said it wants to put itself in a position to scoop up that business.

Christine Olmsted, corporate development and strategy director at SCC, said the route to customers was evolving and the business wanted to get ahead of those changes.

“You’ll see a convergence in our industry over time. Even firms that have always traditionally focused on the very pointy end of strategy are coming down the food chain into the build and integrate layers of things. Infrastructure firms are coming up that layer and we’re all going to meet in the middle,” she said.

“What that means for us at SCC is being on the front foot in that transformation of our industry. This is a move for us that signals not a change in our strategy, but an expansion of our strategy. We will continue to be a modern and innovative reseller for our clients, and we will add this capability to serve them in more ways.” 

Olmsted said the initial reaction from vendors had been positive as SCC was heading in a direction that would help them to reach more customers.

“[Vendors have told us], ‘You’re building the capability we hope you’ll build to help customers evaluate the tech landscape’, and it’s really about that trusted advisory relationship with a customer to help them make the decisions,” she said.

The term digital solution and service provider (DSSP) is one that SCC is likely to use a lot more going forward as it tries to clarify to users what it can deliver.

“DSSP is really about defining a new category of company – not a solution or product company or services company, but a collective company. So DSSP is a term to encompass what we, SCC, can now do,” said Olmsted.

“We can help you get great technology and source it; we can help you leverage amazing software solutions that are out there and find those; we can take your products through our recycling capability – device as a service, end-to-end, full lifecycle, down to deconstruction of it; and we can help you to solve complex business problems and build...software solutions to solve those problems. So it’s a true end-to-end [service].

“There is no category that describes that today. It’s not an MSP [managed service provider] because it’s a bit more complex than that. On the front end, the consulting lens, it’s not a consultancy. It’s a term we coined because we believe it’s a new category. It’s about being a go-to partner to the customer, and that’s what we care about.”

Chris Roberts, CEO of Nimble, said the firm was bringing more digital consultancy expertise to SCC and had built a business that takes complex problems and solves them for customers.

“We’re an end-to-end product and technology consultancy. We start tackling user-centred design problems quite early, [establishing] who we build products and services for, and discovering their needs,” he added. “That covers looking at personas, a zoomed-out service design, looking at what’s on and off screen, and then we do a lot in the full-stack engineering space.”

Olmsted said Nimble was not a full stop for SCC, and more activity on the market was planned to support the business ambition.

“We will continue to aggressively evolve SCC,” she said. “We believe it’s an important opportunity to transform and expand so that we can continue to be helpful to our customers in their transformation, and that means adding new capability and continuing to invest in new things.”