NSC Global on new partnership with Fulcrum and the plan to become a billion-pound firm
The British reseller is going through a strategic shift to become a true partner that helps customers stay relevant through digital transformation
NSC Global is launching a new partnership with Fulcrum Labs to address the evolving digital challenges facing the telecom industry.
The new collaboration is also part of a broader, five-year plan to become a billion-pound revenue organisation, Paul Warburton, chief digital and marketing officer and NSC Global tells CRN.
"That's the driving force behind this, which is why we're doing a lot of the groundwork now - changing how we go to market and forming partnerships. This will be the first of a number of different strategic partnerships that will support our objectives."
The £158m-revenue London-based reseller wants to shift away from being the channel's "plumbers" - taking on work that other organisations didn't want to do – to being a true partner.
Warburton says: "As we move towards a tightly connected mobility society, we need to think about how to remain relevant.
"The path to relevance involves being a true partner. This means not just waiting for work, but helping organisations think about how they can stay relevant through technology roadmaps.
"I strongly believe that true digital transformation only happens when you change the customer experience; otherwise, it's just digitalisation."
He also explains how NSC discusses digital transformation with customers by exploring what ideal customer experience they want, then work backwards to determine the operational and technology changes needed to enable that vision.
Finding the Fulcrum
"This process creates the demand picture that we aim to fulfil. As we build this demand picture through customer conversations, we realise there are new capabilities we need in our toolkit. Our services must evolve, which is where partnerships come in.
"We looked at companies like Fulcrum and saw value they could bring to augment what we already do well, rather than trying to completely reinvent ourselves in areas where we won't excel."
He says companies like Razor, part of Fulcrum Labs' AI group, offer opportunities to enhance its services in ways that would take far more effort for NSC to develop alone.
Partnering allows the reseller to provide more value to clients than it could on its own. And AI is definitely among those enhancements that NSC is planning to bring on with Fulcrum.
"We're already using genAI solutions that we're developing for our service desk environment," Warburton says. "This enhances responsiveness to our clients while making the experience more affordable, valuable, and dependable. The AI expertise helps accelerate this work for us, enhancing our classical offering."
Beyond AI, NSC is looking at the connected world and connected platforms as they emerge.
"We're working with other companies across sectors on platform integration, especially around security. For instance, one organisation specialises in automotive security, which is part of the broader landscape evolving.
"What Razor and Fulcrum can help us with is determining the role we want to play in that connected society. How do we bring the security angle? How do we partner with these other organisations coming alongside us? It's about presenting our end customers with an aggregated set of solutions rather than just being a point solution provider, making it easier for them to implement."
This also fits into the ‘as-a-service' model, Warburton adds.
"Take network-as-a-service, for example. To truly make that a consumption-based model, we need to create the surrounding services, technical architecture - things we would traditionally have sold upfront."
He says enhancements like this will keep the company relevant.
"Behind the core offering is installation, maintenance, network operations - capabilities we have. But to turn it into a true consumption model, we must deploy new tools for security, automation, applied observability to remove waste. Partnering accelerates our own transformational journey into these new models and capabilities."
Creating operational efficiencies
When asked about operational efficiencies, Warburton says the company use a "service aggregation model" based on "continuously driving out waste".
"Traditionally, the market wants price certainty – ‘I want to buy this at this price for maybe a five-year contract.'
"But typically, in year one they're happy with the new price, by year two they've gotten used to it, year three they get agitated, and somewhere in years four and five it becomes a toxic relationship because they think you've done nothing for them for a long time.
"What we think you have to do is incentivise yourself to drive out waste by creating KPIs and SLAs that support true continuous improvement.
"Underpin that with outcome-based commercials - gain-share that encourages waste removal, risk-reward mechanisms that allow innovation and investment from both sides."
He says it's about getting that construct right - a new commercial approach to deliver.
An example, Warburton explains, is NSC's global network deployment where a customer wanted multi-region rollout, but each region had its own budget and no central programme office funding.
"They had a painful experience trying to centrally manage it, no governance, countries repeating work with local vendors - a horrible mix. We said we could fund the central programme office on a risk-reward basis, taking revenue from the regions.
"We build locally but provide a consistent global solution as their single partner. Along the way, we remove waste and create efficiencies because now it's under one umbrella and we can spot and repeat learnings. The end result is a more cost-effective solution, a better outcome for the global customer.
"All we did was a different commercial approach rewarding us properly to be incentivised to do the right thing, not slave to a nonsensical SLA."
That's the thinking behind being the right partner NSC is hoping to develop. The customer couldn't solve this issue themselves - they just saw local budgets, no central funding, inconsistent outcomes.
"By understanding their real problem - inconsistency, no control - we provided the right solution, not what they originally asked for.
"That's the mentality shift we're seeing. Then layering on the consumption model, I remove all problems and provide huge flexibility - really advantageous and playing to our core strengths. The same things we've always done, just a matured way of taking it to market, hugely important for us and customers."
A go-to-market switch
Warburton defines NSC's legacy go-to-market model "if they win a deal, we might win".
That meant that even when NSC put in effort, it didn't necessarily turn into rewards.
"What we're moving towards now is a ‘we win together' model. Instead of waiting for them to bring us a requirement to respond to, we're actually out there selling together. We have ‘solution chambers' helping develop the solution jointly," Warburton says.
The reason this is important is that NSC's go-to-market becomes much more of a consultative engagement helping solve problems, he claims.
"We have expertise they don't, so the idea of us sitting in the background while they define the need misses opportunities. We're now much more proactive - providing a solution chamber team to work virtually with their team. Then we embed our offering as part of their portfolio. Instead of being procured later as an afterthought commodity, we've created bundled services and a consumption model.
This step is a maturity step, Warburton explains.
"We realised the old way wasted time for both players, so spending that time upfront together is better than convincing them later we're the right path after they've already won. Of course, procurement dislikes this as they want to continually go through RFPs. But the question is, what do they gain from that vs. losing by not having a ‘win together' approach?
"For our direct customer relationships, it's about being more consultative - not just a partner waiting to be asked to do something.
"We aim to be that right partner, offering insight into where the industry is going, helping them envision their future customer experience, and constructing the right solution."