Exertis IT CEO: 'Industry is hopeful for an uptick in consumer spend'
CRN caught up with Griffin to hear his thoughts on how the upcoming general election will affect the IT landscape, and his take on the current impact of AI
The tech industry will have to wait for a bounce back in enterprise and consumer spend alongside the unknown effect of the impending UK general election.
That is according to Exertis IT CEO Tim Griffin, who recently sat down with CRN and gave his predictions and expectations on how the second half of 2024 will shape up.
"Most of the industry is still very hopeful for an uptick in both enterprise customer spend and indeed, consumer spend.
"If you looked to the analysts six to 12 months ago, most of them were talking about a second half bounce. I think most of us recognise that that has probably pushed back somewhat.
"And if you think about the UK environment, we're in purdah now. We're likely to have a change of government, and new ministries being headed up by a new government is probably going to delay spending."
However, Griffin says the good news is he would hope the industry will have enough time in the balance of the financial year for that to be caught up.
"There's a paradox in the sense that, on the one hand, election? Not so good. The reality is that it removes uncertainty, and because it's so early in the financial year that we can probably catch up, which is good news."
Breathing new life into tech investment
He adds distributors are looking at the technology inflections currently happening to provide new life in tech investment, with the likes of recent chipset releases, AI PCs, Windows 11 and Microsoft Copilot.
"You're looking at that and hoping that that will deliver a significant reinvestment in technology. I call it a tsunami of pent up demand in the corporate sector that still actually dates back to Covid that needs to be refreshed, but it isn't coming through at the pace that we are all looking for.
"I suspect that within the next 12 months that will come through, and our challenge is being ready for that and enabling our recent reseller community and our retail community to be ready for that."
The true impact of AI
Last year Exertis Enterprise launched its AI Centre of Excellence which collates the AI talent, knowledge and resources required to enable AI-based transformation projects for its VARS, providers, integrators, and all their end users.
The COE is said to collaborate regularly with NVIDIA to deliver training across products, as well as discuss strategy, vertical focus and where NVIDIA are experiencing the most traction.
Griffin told CRN in January he believed one of the biggest trends in 2024 will be the accelerating evolution of artificial intelligence.
Six months on, he weighs its current influence in the channel.
"Everybody's talking about it. Everyone is probably overestimating the impact that AI will have in the short-term, but underestimating its impact in the long-term."
Griffin believes this is partly to do with the ‘tsunami of refresh' he earlier coined.
"I think if people are going to invest in AI, they want to be able to understand the use case models, and I think those are still nascent. People haven't really understood how they might be able to apply AI in their environment."
However, over time, Griffin predicts AI will become ubiquitous.
"Everybody will be using AI in some way, shape or form, in the same way the internet is insidious in our lives today.
"But when we started, we were all scrapping around during the .com boom in the late 90s. Everyone thought it was going to be amazing. And of course, it wasn't immediately, but it is today. It's in everything we do. The same will happen in AI."
H2 2024 priorities
The operative word in Griffin's plan for H2 is ‘more'.
"We have aspirations to have more customers buying more product, more often for more," he says.
"That's just really enabling our resellers and retailers to be profitable and sustainable and for us to be likewise."
Griffin delves a little deeper into how Exertis will support its resellers.
"We think about the value that we create in the marketplace as delivering reach for vendors, delivering simplicity for both vendors and resellers in terms of supply chain, and then delivering leverage for our retailers.
"Leverage could be financial leverage, logistics leverage. It could be warehouse leverage.
"A lot of the time it's around capability leverage, so us having the wherewithal to provide design, technical expertise that they can then expand their capabilities that they can sell into resellers
"So they don't have to be a specialist in everything they can, they can leverage distribution. That's how we enable their success."
Biggest opportunity for growth?
Griffin states a business can capture revenue growth either by the market growing or taking share.
"And so taking share in a market that's broadly flat, there's single digit growth in certain areas of the market, is really important," he says.
"The way that you do that is by exceeding your customers expectations. That ties really back to the ‘more' point I was making, more customers, more product, more often."
And his strategy to do so? Lies in operational excellence, according to Griffin.
"It's really around enabling the core elements of your business, from sales coverage to sales expertise to delighting your customer, through all the ancillary sales support functions all the way through to finance, and then keeping our promises at the back end in terms of logistics.
"Making sure you've got the stock on time and you can deliver it. All of those things in terms of operational excellence, play into being able to execute on that more strategy."