Advania UK CEO Geoff Kneen on Servium and CCS goals, and doubling AI revenue in 2025

More M&A, bringing the circular economy to Sweden and the UK, and AI investments. Kneen gives CRN the lowdown

Advania UK boss Geoff Kneen is laser-focused on nailing down the cross-sell between the channel firm’s recent acquisitions and improving its managed services with AI in 2025.

The Microsoft partner made waves last year with its double swoop of Servium and CCS Media, Kneen’s highlight of 2024, he tells CRN.

“Adding that reseller capability and that technology sourcing capability to our MSP and digital transformation heritage was a huge highlight, and to do it in such a big way with not one, but two acquisitions,” he says.

With these two organisations under its belt, Kneen’s priority now is bringing CCS, Servium and Advania together as one business by the end of 2025 and getting the go-to-market strategy right.

“It’s more important to measure additional value to the clients.

“How many clients have we been able to take that digital transformation and MSP service to in the CCS space?

“We’ve gone from having 2,000 to 9,500 clients. So how successful have we been in increasing the value we add to clients by cross-selling Advania services into CCS and vice versa?

“That's a big thing we're working on at this moment in time is, how do we take all the solutions to all the clients? We believe we can add a huge amount more to the client relationships we've already got.”

Will Advania UK keep adding companies to its roster in 2025? Kneen says this is unlikely.

“It would have to be a very strategic addition to the business.

“It wouldn't be in the same area. But if we saw the right things around AI or analytics, then potentially. But that would be much more likely in 2026.”

Doubling AI revenues

Kneen states Advania UK had a healthy uptake of AI last year and continues to see its AI solution proliferate across its client base.

“I think 2024 was a good start in our industry around AI, and I think it will accelerate in 2025.

“We’re setting ourselves a KPI around making sure we see the level of AI revenue more than double into 2025 as well.”

He adds that driving innovation of Advania’s offerings with AI is another big priority this year.

“There's huge amounts of improvement we can do with our managed services offering with the use of AI, and we invested in a partnership last year with McKinsey to actually develop our AI roadmap around our internal service offerings.”

AI is one of Advania’s leading growth drivers, having worked a great deal with Microsoft Copilot.

“We've got a private ChatGPT solution of our own and that's where we're expecting to see our revenues more than double next year,” Kneen says.

But other areas of the channel partner’s business also have a high potential growth rate, like Microsoft Power Platform.

“The low-code, no-code offerings behind the power platform are starting to come of age in the marketplace.

“But even in some of the core parts of the business we’re still seeing strong growth.

“We’re starting to see the core managed services part of the market show signs of coming back to life.

“We expect to see an increase in the movement of devices around both Windows 11 and AI PCs into 2025, so we're expecting to see that grow significantly this year.”

Bringing the circular economy to Sweden and the UK

With these additional capabilities brought on with Servium and CCS, Advania now has a new set of opportunities it can pursue, such as the circular economy, Kneen reveals.

“We already offer take back of client devices, and we do offer recycling of client devices, but a few years down the line we want to be a through-life service offering for our clients, where we're delivering that whole hardware asset life cycle as a managed service offering to our clients.

“We will be launching a completely Advania-owned, 100 per cent circular economy offering into the Swedish market in March of 2025.

“And it’s top of my agenda to make sure we’re fast behind Sweden in making sure we can offer a full circular economy solution to the UK market as well.”

Economic uncertainty

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered her 2024 Autumn Budget for the UK in October, which included tax increases, public spending increases, and borrowing increases.

Outlining some of the biggest challenges facing the Advania UK business, Kneen points to concerns around IT spending following Reeves’ announcement.

“I think the big question for all of us in 2025 is how businesses are going to respond to the economy.

“How is everyone going to invest in tech this year?

“The way we're responding to it is making sure that the outcome that gets delivered to clients and the business benefit that we can deliver to clients is really clear for them to measure, so they can see that any kind of an investment is worthwhile.

“That's where we're turning our attention to.”