Sweetbaum on IT Lab rebrand: 'We wanted a name that does what it says on the box'
IT Labs CEO explains to CRN the rationale for its new rebrand and why Mirus IT and Perspective Risk will retain their names
IT Lab's new name of Content + Cloud is more representative of the firm's widened array of capabilities, according to CEO Peter Seetbaum.
The rebrand had a "soft launch" in June, where Sweetbaum announced IT Lab and Content + Code would merge to form the new entity.
The new brand comes into effect from today and came about partly due to the M&A activity the company has undergone in recent years, scooping up Content +Code in 2018, Mirus IT in 2018 and Sol-Tec earlier this year. The latter will be folded into the new name in due course, Sweetbaum said.
"The reason we thought it was the right time to rebrand is that we have brought together some fantastic organisations with individually great heritage and brand identity," he told CRN.
"We were really keen not to come up with some nondescript Latin or Greek name that nobody can identify around. I understand why people do it, but it's very hard to build any brand understanding, affinity or knowledge around an unknown Latin word.
"We wanted to be able to bring organisations together to consolidate around an identity that was new and independent to a greater degree; we wanted a brand that was much more representative of what we do - a brand that literally says on the front of the box exactly what our business does for them."
Mirus IT will remain as a sub-brand within the group because of its name recognition as an IT provider to SMBs, as well as being the focal point of the company's SMB Centre of Excellence, which caters to the specific needs of that demographic.
Perspective Risk - a security and penetration testing specialist which was acquired in 2017 - will also retain its brand as it has been the "genesis" of a growing security portfolio, Sweetbaum explained.
Content+Cloud specialises in professional and managed IT services, which are split into cloud and digital transformation-focused solutions including round-the-clock support, infrastructure and cloud platform services, advisory and business change services and collaboration and unified comms solutions, among others.
The consolidation comes about from the strategy outlined by the group in 2017 to align with Microsoft's "Three Clouds" - 365, Azure and Dynamics, the chief exec said.
"We could see the potential to leverage the capabilities Microsoft was building across their three clouds and how valuable it would be to our clients to enable transformation," he explained.
"Microsoft has executed this exceptionally well; building a set of services which can help clients not only operate at scale, confidently and flexibly in terms of capital and costs, but also enable genuine digital transformation and change."
The firm underwent a restructure in November 20019 to simplify its own organisation and its services around Microsoft's offerings and to build a strong data capability in the respective Microsoft cloud areas, the CEO said.
As digital transformation accelerates among customers, this new entity offers them a clear understanding of what the firm can provide them, Sweetbaum added.
"I hope it will really to represent to our clients the journey that we can take them on and what we do for them," he stated.
"I think that it is probably quite an explicit marker for the channel, around the fact that being able to help clients transform and exist in the hyperscale is real.
"Clients are looking for the ability to drive value through the way they can transform their businesses, and that's always going to be much easier using public cloud and the capabilities that Microsoft has within its three clouds."
James Chadwick, GM of One Commercial Partner at Microsoft, commented: "As separate entities, Content and Code, IT Lab and Sol-Tec have seen rapid growth in scale and capability across Microsoft's cloud services. Under this new brand, we look forward to even greater alignment, in turn helping Content+Cloud's customers achieve more."