Meet the company that wants to take managed services to the next level

Founded during the Covid era, Wokingham-HQ Nebula Global Services has broken ground in the US and is on a mission to deliver outcome-based success

A new player has entered the game to fill a gap in the market and make being a service provider less about technology and more about scaling channel customer capabilities.

Experienced IT sector pros Peter Murphy and Ross Teague have both spent several years in the channel services space.

Murphy worked at Ingram Micro's Comms-care business for 12 and a half years, while Teague previously founded and owned a company called ITEC Intelligent Services which he sold to Exclusive Networks back in 2015.

The duo noticed a heavy amount of consolidation over the last few years where a lot of channel services companies and partners were acquired by distributors.

This led the pair to realise an opportunity in the market where they felt that through market consolidation there was a gap to approach this challenge slightly differently, making it less about technology and more about quality of experience and quality of outcomes.

And thus, Nebula Global Services was born.

"We found that most of our competitors are more focused on technology and more focused on particular vendors that they have alignment with. Whereas we're more agnostic in that regard, and very much focused on this sort of outcome based global services," said Teague.

Founded during the first lockdown in 2020, the Wokingham-HQ company is only a three year old sapling right now, but has a roster of more than 100 partners globally.

Nebula doesn't deal in hardware or software sales but offers professional services, managed services, and Resource-as-a-Service.

It is billed as a channel services organisation with a mission statement around being "customer success obsessed".

"It's very difficult in the IT services industry to truly do things well globally and ensure that the standards are high and that you consistently deliver high quality," Murphy said.

"So that is the main focus of what we're building and what Nebula is all about - helping our channel customers extend their scale and capabilities to maximise the value that they can offer to their own clients."

Nebula's goals in 2023

Nebula's current strategy is simple - to maintain sustainable and steady growth in both its top line and bottom line, having already doubled turnover this.

More international expansion is also on the cards, with the pair dialling in to speak with CRN while away in the US opening its first location in Tampa, Florida.

"Once we've done that we will look to expand a bit more into the Asia PAC region. We haven't found our home there yet. It might be Malaysia, or Singapore. We've got a bit more research to do on that, but fundamentally our goal is to stay true to our values."

While Murphy added another key priority revolved around looking at how Nebula can blend automation in with its service quality and the white glove service it wants to provide.

"We're looking at ways to be more efficient for our customers and help them get pricing quicker and how you do that without affecting the relationship and taking that away. So I think that's another big thing that we're looking at this year as well," Murphy said.

Does Nebula want to go public?

Funded entirely through its co-founders with no external backing, Teague said that a public listing is never not on the table.

"Never say never because it's one of those scenarios where there's a myriad of routes we could take moving forward.

"In our sort of short to medium term aspirations I don't see a place for it there.

"We've got a really long runway in front of us of organic growth that we can see and we can build. That's going to be our strategy for the short to medium term is organic growth not through acquisition," explained Teague.

Where does Nebula see its growth opportunity areas?

Teague outlined Nebula's "dream client" is a business with a dispersed infrastructure and dispersed workforce.

"And the growth areas we see certainly for the rest of this year and beyond that we're growing in from a technology standpoint is around wireless technologies," he revealed.

"We're seeing a lot around modern workspace environments, which wireless plays into with people changing to the office of the future and we see a lot around the IoT.

"As well as that, growing very steadily is our more traditional managed services business, which is around break fix maintenance where there's still massive supply chain issues out there where people can't get a hold of new technology because people like Cisco, for example, have got long lead times."