11:11 Systems: 'We're in the middle of what's happening with Broadcom and VMware'

Kaushik Ray, chief experience officer and Dante Orsini, chief strategy officer sit down with CRN to chat what’s changing in the business

11:11 Systems lays out its growth strategy for the year following a string of M&A focusing on customers, including those impacted by Broadcom's takeover of VMware.

The group completed the acquisitions of two Sungard businesses at the tail end of 2022.

This meant 2023 was about bringing these entities together into "one 11:11 Systems".

Kaushik Ray, chief experience officer, and Dante Orsini, chief strategy officer sat down with CRN to discuss how the business is evolving and what it's set out to do in 2024.

"Our focus is to be a managed infrastructure services provider, to be able to meet the customer where they need to be met on their journey," explains Orsini.

"Whether they're trying to manage infrastructure themselves in their own datacentres, whether they're looking to optimise that and leverage various different cloud technologies.

"When you look at the challenges with the datacentre and managing multiple datacentres and having SaaS based applications, let's face it, the operating environment for a customer has got really complicated."

Orsini adds 11:11 needs to be able to assess where those challenges are, and where it can provide value.

"In many cases they may start off as a data protection conversation. It may be a migration conversation because people are facing this really high impact of the Broadcom/VMware acquisition.

"So being able to help guide them and implement solutions in programmes to get them to a point where they are cyber resilient is a big focus for our company."

Adding more value

11:11's chief experience officer Kaushik Ray says that while the group has financial goals like every company, its one biggest focus area is the customer.

"That is one thing we have decided, and there is absolutely top down buy-in to make sure we are myopically, singularly focused on the customer.

"Whatever the customer buys, whatever products or services they buy, how do we add more value.

"The biggest differentiator for us is not necessarily the technologies that we are using to deliver the solutions. You can buy the same tech from multiple other providers. Our differentiation is the experience they get from us."

Ray adds 11:11 has invested in different platform solutions that tie in the entire lifecycle of its customer with the aim to ensure all the additional capabilities brought to the fold through acquisitions are integrated into that same seamless user experience.

"We are launching employee engagement and enablement training on what that means," says Ray.

"We say the customer comes first, but what does that mean to somebody who's in the billing department, accounts, operations, service management?

"The goal is, how do we translate every single interaction the customer has with anybody or any channel of 11:11 into a stellar experience."

Orsini chimes in with how all this influences the channel.

"When you think about how that impacts the channel, we need to continue to make sure our services are easily understood, easy to consume, and easy to support.

"That's always been the key to success for us in the channel. We've got a really big enablement team working hand in hand with all of our partners to help them understand what that means, not just to their business but also to their clients business."

UK growth strategy

Orsini continues that the channel is the focal point of 11:11's UK growth strategy.

"The channel is number one, by far.

"Looking at our new business, between 80 - 85 per cent comes from the channel.

"We've invested heavily in that team. We've made sure we've got the proper alignment from an enablement perspective and from a compensation perspective."

But what Orsini thinks will shake things up this year is Broadcom's acquisition of VMware.

"This year, what I think is going to change is, since we're known for backup etc, we're in the middle of what's happening with Broadcom and VMware.

"A lot of our partners have a relationship with VMware. Their customers are facing a really big challenge because they're trying to move from this new cloud bundle."

He says that if a customer is not up for renewal they don't have a lot of options.

"A lot of people are coming out saying, ‘I've quoted the renewal, nobody's happy about it, and they're gonna have to buy more kit but they're looking to see if they can actually migrate to you.'

"This is something we do all the time. So reinvigorating that discussion around infrastructure as a service in a VMware host environment is a big focus for us this year."

Challenge = opportunity

Whilst the VMware/Broadcom saga presents itself as a challenge, Orsini states it also opens doors to opportunities.

"The challenge is they're disrupting the market in a big way in a very short period of time.

"And how do we quickly react to be able to change the way that we approach the market?

"Being customer focused we're trying to minimise the impact on the customer base.

"The opportunity is that we're one of 100 global pinnacle partners in the top tier of their programme that they're very focused on with a lot of investment, joint go-to-market, and support.

"If you look at our platform whether it's production, backup disaster recovery, security services, connectivity services, all that in a single interface, single platform, both people in that community of pinnacle partners don't have anything like that.

"While it's very disruptive to the market, a lot of people are grumpy, rightfully so and I think we're still in a really strong position to be able to not only help our existing customers, but help the market where they're forced to make a decision at this point."