QBS Software CEO: ‘It will be another year of pain for disties with a hardware focus’

Stevinson discusses the plan to get to $1bn by 2030, original thinking in the GenAI era, and organic growth

Dave Stevinson, CEO of QBS Software, reflects on the company’s eventful 2024 and his plans for the future as the company aims to bring business revenue to $1bn by 2030.

The key to this? What QBS has dubbed Project Boolean, “a huge transformation programme with multiple advisors across multiple functions within the organisation, including refinancing, recruiting, restrategising, replatforming, to get the company ready for 2025 as we move into being a big scale up company.”

The multi-year project aims to reposition QBS for the scale it anticipates.

“We recognise that what got us here won’t get us there,” Stevinson tells CRN.

The distributor does indeed need to be prepared for 2025 as Stevinson predicts a whopping 50 per cent growth next year, with an addition of 100 heads to the company’s workforce.

In 2024, QBS has so far grown its headcount thanks to the acquisition of South-African distributor Maxtec, and has expanded its European influence through the acquisition of Hungarian software distributor KSKFT.

“We are growing our demand generation team and working closely with Tier 2 software publishers who need help with partner recruit, partner enablement and are looking for a distributor with the laser focus on growing their ARR, not just fulfilment of their renewals.”

To this end, the distie has made several key vendor signings, as Stevinson emphasises its focus on challenger vendors.

Pain or glory

For the hardcore believers in hardware, Stevinson has harsh news: “It will obviously be another year of pain for those distributors with a hardware focus.”

On the other hand, he predicts that cybersecurity, software, and services, the current hottest markets, will become more attractive than ever in the near future.

To fuel its ambitions and boost its growth, QBS therefore wants to “find companies who match their ambition and are looking to exit” as the company seeks to compound their “organic growth through a subtle blend of acquisition layered on top.”

GenAI – Game changer or damp squib?

Talking of trends, the conversation naturally turns to generative AI.

“There is no doubt that there is a lot of hype and hope around genAI,” said Stevinson.

“Every business must embed a GPT into the core functions to be competitive.

“My concern is too many businesses are not being careful with their data and are sharing too much information that could well be a security risk.”

Stevinson also touches on the importance of original thinking when making decisions, as AI has limitations that human intelligence can surpass.

To illustrate his point, he shares his “malicious theory” about AI.

“Say a user types into ChatGPT three bullet points and asks it to turn them into a podcast. The next user asks the podcast to turn it into an article. And the third user asks AI to turn it into three bullet points and the cycle of nonsense means that over time, actual meaning is drained from the content.

“This is why we put a great deal of effort into original thought into our recruitment process.”

Instead, Stevinson suggests refocusing on advanced data engineering.

Even though it may be “less glamourous”, he describes it as “the hyper critical structure to build the SLM or LLM that is needed for analysis and training to enable the GPT to produce sensible answers rather than hallucinations.”