Why my pains and challenges as an MSP led to me joining Fujitsu

Wow, the middle of May already, and incredibly 10 weeks into this new role for me. I joined Fujitsu in March 2018 to drive the growth and development of our Cloud & Managed Service Provider partners, a new area of focus for Fujitsu in UK&I. Having come from a background of building and developing an MSP myself (for more years than I care to mention!) and having transitioned that business to one with majority annuity-based revenues, the opportunity to join a globally respected brand, at a time of consistent growth, and in a role that allows me to shape the way that we work alongside our service provider partners was incredibly appealing.

We all know that the one constant in our industry is evolution and change, with the move to all things Cloud, the increasing influence of IOT and the constant reference to Digital Transformation and the myriad of interpretations that brings! These changes present continuing challenges to service providers of all sizes, but also represent real opportunities for those that can adapt their offerings to embrace and address these new technologies.

The past two weeks have seen us launch the pilot phase of our partner programme for service providers and it’s been exciting to see such positive press and industry coverage around our central theme of co-creation. Thinking back to my past, I wish there had been the opportunity to be involved in a programme that afforded us the ability to jointly develop solutions with a leading vendor. Solutions that combined an element of shared risk, flexible commercial terms that were aligned to how our customers wanted to pay us, and offered the prospect of a vendors salesforce helping to promote, and even sell, those jointly developed solutions – unthinkable then but a reality today that Fujitsu is bringing to our service provider partners.

I remember all too vividly the pain of striving to make our service offerings less complex and more efficient and repeatable, whilst trying to build differentiation in a really crowded market and selling stickier solutions to our customers. At the same time we never really had sufficient resource to be as innovative as we knew we needed to be, plus the cash flow challenges which present themselves when transitioning from a transactional model to one built on recurring, annuity revenue. Oh, not to mention working out how to pay and motivate a sales team for monthly, subscription-based services!

But then, after a period of time, the joy of seeing 50% contribution coming from annuity-based revenue every month. The predictability and stability that this brought to our business. The ability this affords to invest further in innovation, and of course, the very real value that contractually committed, annuity revenue streams present to the shareholders.

I’ve experienced this journey first hand, and now part of my goal at Fujitsu is to use this experience, coupled with our scale and reach, to help other service providers on their journey to annuity-based revenues. We’ve already had great success with service providers so please take a look at what we’ve been doing to date, and if you’d like to understand more or to join us on the journey then please just get in touch.