'More deals in 2024? The year is still young': SCC acquires Microsoft partner Resonate
SCC’s head of strategy and MD of collaboration sit down with CRN alongside Resonate’s CEO to discuss how SCC is evolving with this deal
SCC today announced its third acquisition in 12 months with its takeover of cloud voice and collaboration services provider Resonate.
Founded in 2015, Resonate mainly operates in the UK and Slovakia.
It hones in on the enterprise space and counts the energy, retail and manufacturing sectors as its key verticals.
Graham Fry, MD of collaboration at SCC, tells CRN this focus opens doors for the duo.
"That's a massive opportunity for SCC. Over 50 per cent of our business is in the public sector and Resonate didn't have access to those markets," he says.
"An area where people are trying to do more with less is across the public sector. So suddenly, you've opened up that whole market to Resonate and I think that's where we'll see a lot of growth this year."
Fry adds a major reason for the acquisition largely revolves around skills and technology.
"About about a year ago we started looking at the marketplace, looking where it was strong across collaboration and digital workplace, and where we had gaps in our portfolio.
"We went through an internal process to look at whether or not to build out. All the stats coming from the analysts showed the opportunities are right now. So we decided that building out was too slow.
"We started looking across the market and we found Resonate and they ticked all the boxes of what we would have wanted to build."
How SCC is evolving
Christine Olmsted, SCC'S head of strategy & corporate development outlines to CRN how the deal fits into its investment strategy and the direction the group is going.
"This is part of the build out of our services portfolio," she says.
"SCC has invested to build services around the Microsoft toolset, including an Azure platform, Azure managed service, as well as a cybersecurity service.
"Those are organic investments, but when we looked at the rest of the portfolio, we saw an opportunity to do inorganic growth, acquiring skill sets and services that help us bring more to our clients.
"Microsoft's obviously very popular with companies of all sizes, and having a capability like this one, a world class capability to do global large scale Teams implementations was a real opportunity for us to bring into the portfolio."
Fry adds that SCC's skills and services capabilities currently lie more around the MTR (Microsoft Teams Rooms) space, and other areas in the digital workplace
He states the real challenge for the £3.3bn-revenue group was the fact it didn't have the skills within Microsoft Teams telephony.
"And it's not just those skills, it's how do we then integrate into CRMs? How do we integrate into contact centres? That's where we're seeing most of the demand at the moment. That's the area that most of our clients are challenged with."
SCC currently has around 170 heads in its collaboration business, which has since doubled "overnight" with the addition of Resonate.
"Most of those skills at the moment are more on the collaboration side, meeting rooms etc.
"We don't have masses of heads in the telephony and contact centre space. So this evens out the split and completes the picture," says Fry.
"This is the third acquisition I've been involved in. The first two were more in the MTR space, and we've gone from being a player in that market to being top three.
"Our ambition is to get to the world's top three for telephony and contact centres. We want to be going toe to toe with the likes of Vodafone BT in this space.
"If we look at the other big players around there, like Gamma and BT, a lot of their target audience is the ‘s' of SMB. We're looking at the enterprise, so we want to be top three when we're looking at that sort of lens of the UK market and then far beyond France and across EMEA."
Investing in Microsoft
Fry explains most of SCC's clients sit with Microsoft.
"Teams was the big winner in the pandemic and people are looking at their legacy telephony and contact centres. Therefore some sort of integration into Teams is almost a necessity.
"A large percentage of clients, especially in the UK are Teams centric, so having capabilities that mirror what our customers are asking for, over time, trends will change, but at the moment, it's a very Microsoft centric world.
"We're driven by where clients are and where we think the best technology is to help our customers with their challenges."
More acquisitions in 2024?
Olmsted admits it's been a busy year and SCC still has a lot to fit in with the acquisitions of Vohkus, Nimble and now Resonate.
"We will always look at opportunities to bring compelling value propositions to our customers and we never stop looking at companies and thinking about ways to expand our portfolio.
"Will we do another deal this year? I don't know, the year is still young, so maybe. It's only February," she says.
Although, looking at the deals SCC has done so far as well as the areas its focused its organic investments, Olmstead says it's about bringing more to clients, more services, more capability, more insight, more expertise.
"So what do we want to achieve in 2024? I'd say we would like our customers and potential future customers to see SCC in a new light. As somebody who can add value across their entire technology estate."
What it means to Resonate
SCC will operate Resonate as a separate company under the guidance of its CEO Robert Garcia and the current Resonate management team, with additional support provided by senior SCC executives.
Garcia, who will now be reporting to Fry, opens up about what the deal means to him and his team.
"We looked at the marketplace and realised there's potential for us to grow but there was a mismatch between the potential and the trajectory we're on.
"We knew we had to make some changes. We needed to get access to more customers. We needed to have other services that we can sell for existing customers.
"And we knew we weren't going to be able to do that organically, so this deal made perfect sense for us."