XChange EMEA day two round-up
The second day of CRN’s first European event was packed with talks covering sustainability, cloud costs and M&A
Delegates at CRN's XChange EMEA event in Amsterdam witnessed another day full of keynotes from the channel's leading partners on day two.
Day one's talks broached areas around business development, including M&A and internal culture.
The second day of the European conference covered other impactful areas such as ESG, reducing cloud costs and how to get an acquisition right.
Al Wynn, business transformation director at Softcat kicked off the morning with his session on sustainability, urging the audience to raise the issue as a priority in their organisations.
He said the industry needs to drive change to create a sustainable outcome and a sustainable future for succeeding generations.
Wynn didn't just preach to attendees, however, but rather gave his view on the first steps companies can take on their journey to net zero.
These steps of course include tackling scope one, two and three emissions, the third being famously difficult as they lie with partners and suppliers and encompass all other emissions associated with a company's activities,
"Scope three is where the impact is. To do that, you've got to work with others, and you've got to drive change," Wynn said.
"So how do we do that? Firstly, understand the data and understand what it is to be net zero.
"For those of you a little bit unfamiliar with that, and where to go, the things I'd steer you towards are sustainability consultants, there are numerous partners out there to help you with compliance, data validation, and so on. And look at the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi).
"So who is talking about this? For us, there's four key voices that are called out here. Our customers and RFPs RFIs are becoming increasingly common to see sustainability on bids.
"Anything from 10 per cent to 30 per cent weighting criteria has been attached to this now. So if you haven't got a story, haven't got a strategy, you're going to lose out.
"It's really important to employees as well. It's amazed us just how much warmth and feedback we get from existing employees on the topic of sustainability and then working for an organisation that they're proud of.
"But it's also really important to potential employees as well and attracting talent, individuals wanting to work for an organisation that stands by the right values.
"Next is partners. We talk to so many partners in our world about this topic, it is a strategic imperative.
"Lastly, investors want to make sure they are backing and they are working with the right organisations doing the right things which are illustrative to others."
Wynn told the audience he believes there's a huge opportunity in tech to play a crucial role with innovation and data to drive change.
He added that compliance is another aspect that needs to be taken into great consideration.
"Compliance is becoming so important to ensure you are compliant. And if you're not, you unfortunately will probably be ruled out of business with customers and partners in due course."
Wynn then went onto explain to delegates how they can get the ball rolling on this journey, starting with themselves.
"Focus on internal operations and staff first. Think about energy, think about travel, think about what is within your direct control, get comfortable internally first, and then branch out beyond that.
"From a value chain perspective, it's going to be really important for you to align your targets and goals with your partners within that value chain, your suppliers, your vendors or distributors, and so on. Build those plans, formulate those plans and align stakeholder support.
"Data is crucial to the answer. At the moment, customers don't have enough data to drive choice, product partner data is just not there.
"We're trying desperately to fix that. And some organisations, vendors, disties and others have now formed a bit of a project coalition to bring that together and drive change, drive consistency across the market and hopefully drive more choice.
"Ultimately, this is going to be the biggest game changer in this market in the next 10 to 20 years. It's going to change what people buy, why they buy, where they buy, how they buy. And if you're not a leader you will be left behind."
Read on to hear the top takeaways from from keynotes by Aptum Technologies and Computerland...
XChange EMEA day two round-up
The second day of CRN’s first European event was packed with talks covering sustainability, cloud costs and M&A
Aptum Technologies - reducing cloud costs
Apum Technologies vice president of partnerships Michael Stephens was the last to take to the stage before the afternoon, sharing the findings of Aptum's cloud impact study.
Stephens opened with a history lesson on how cloud has become so "pervasive" in the industry today owing to the introduction of company mandates to move to the public cloud in order to reduce costs.
"But little did they know that cost wasn't going to be so easy to control and manage," Stephens teased the audience.
Aptum's survey of about 400 IT professionals found that 95 per cent agreed that cloud improved efficiency.
Results also showed that 71 per cent said cloud-related costs made up 30 per cent or more of their total IT spend.
It then starts to get interesting, with more than half (52 per cent) of respondents admitting significant IT spend was wasted due to inefficiencies with coud.
Stephens blamed one of the reasons for cloud overspend on poor planning following a rush to the cloud, among others.
"We don't live in just one cloud per customer. On average, a customer has seven to eight different clouds that they're operating their applications within.
"And then just lack of expertise as well."
Flipping the mood, Stephens then explained to delegates how they can maximise value and contain costs.
"Get better visibility into your data. The first thing is, make sure you have visibility into real time data.
"These are not environments that you want to look at, every month, every once a quarter, once every six months, you're going to fall behind if you're not paying attention to the evolution and the journey, and you're just looking at it like you first got there.
"So real time understanding your workloads, understanding seasonality, understanding the use of your workloads in the cloud environment.
"Is it heavy on weekends? Depending on the application, you want to make sure that you understand what those fluctuations are as you're looking at the real time data.
"And then lastly, in this space, you want to assign those costs to work groups. You can start to see if people put their applications in the cloud, they didn't build the basement level of a FinOps culture and structure.
"They're missing this and customers today are going back as quickly as possible, focusing on this."
Stephens said once you have a grasp of the data then you can start coming to some conclusions to reduce spend.
"One of those answers is looking at underutilised resources," he said.
"Usually what we will see as a managed service provider, when a customer hasn't had governance, they did a lot of mandates, and they ran to the public cloud, we will usually see 10 to 20 per cent alone, we can optimise their environments just by looking at unused resources and eliminating them.
"Then you have a business choice as to what you do with those unused resources. You can either downsize and operational expenses are less, or as you start to look at future projects, you can take that excess capacity, point it to the next business days, and then unburden your original business plan with those costs."
Stephens wrapped on what he stated was the most important aspect - companies need to establish the right governance over their cloud journey.
"It's not a project with an end state. This is a mission critical strategy for companies nowadays," he told delegates.
"You have to structure governance in a way that can help manage and push the company into the future.
"What that looks like in my book is a very diversified set of individuals in the company at all different levels, from all different organisations. These folks need to have a common set of objectives, so that they're constantly watching the data. They're constantly moving assets on and infrastructure around projects strategically.
"We see a lot of this being core to a company's future."
XChange EMEA day two round-up
The second day of CRN’s first European event was packed with talks covering sustainability, cloud costs and M&A
How to successfully acquire
Bart Donné, CEO of Computerland was next up after lunch with his talk on how to create synergies and be stronger together when doing acquisitions.
Computerland itself is part of a bigger organisation called NFV, which houses around 16 companies.
"What we see is that, when you combine the two companies, you get greater value," Donné said.
"Or you're supposed to have greater value, because you have bought for the skills, resources, the accounts of that company. And that's what you need to do. You've got the economy of scale.
"But reality is sometimes this goes very swiftly, and sometimes it doesn't."
Donné explained you need to be mindful of visibility, people integration and remember who you are as a company to pull off a successful M&A deal.
He then outlined three models CEOs need to think about post-acquisition - concentration, coordination and coalition.
"Concentration is the first and best model, in my personal opinion, about integrating a company.
"Concentration is where you bring scarce resources that you have in the organisation and you create that centre of competence.
"But also with services, between organisations there is too much overlap. You need to think about concentration, because for each of them you need to have somebody, perhaps you can bring that together with one person or two persons, and they can take a multitude of applications there.
"Coordination. That's another one. All depending on the people in the organisation that you incorporate.
"This is almost similar to coordination, you only bring in the governance on a central level, but you keep everything. You keep the people in the company, and you keep them in touch with the identity of the acquired organisation. And that's a very important aspect.
"So, what is also possible then is that you can enhance the cross selling, right so you can do the cross selling the upselling because you have the channel separated.
"And coalition, that's a one off. You keep everything as it is, you keep everything separated, but with big projects, he 50 million plus projects, and then you are going to build a team, which is a temporary team and consists of all of the different members in that organisation."