Enterprise Times caught up with Steve Garrood, the UK MD for CloudBlue, earlier this year. The interview was conducted in March 2023I first asked him to explain who CloudBlue is.
“I use a very simple analogy for everybody. Everybody knows who Amazon are. They’re a cloud-based marketplace where you can basically buy everything, put it in your shopping basket and then you can settle up with them. However, you need to pay. That’s evolved, so you can have one-time transactions, subscriptions, etc.
“Imagine, if you will, a software company, CloudBlue, who’s done exactly the same thing for subscription management and automation. In a software vendor world, we do exactly the same thing. We enable distributors to operate through their reseller chain across borders, i.e. geographies.
“Onboard as many vendors into their marketplace catalogue as possible. CloudBlue manages the catalogue, manages the end-to-end transaction and manages the subscription. In some cases, now the consumption models that the customer will be using.”
On customers and scale
In researching this piece, it appeared as your two target markets are telecoms and MSPs. Is that where the majority of businesses are as well?
“It’s not necessarily the top two. When you look at our heritage, we’re born out of a platform from a distributor, namely Ingram Micro. Primarily, the reseller market is a happy hunting ground. Telecoms and managed service providers are in there neck and neck with the big boys globally. We look after some rather large organisations, Telefonica, O2, Telstra, and Vodafone.
“Managed service providers is a market in which we are starting to do more and more work because there is a lot of Telco real estate. There are a lot of moves to digitalization and consumption models of software, and also they bundle their products together as a managed service provider would.”
How big is CloudBlue in terms of revenue and customer base?
“While we cannot discuss revenue, in regard to our customer base, we have a substantial number of customers worldwide. Our operational reach spans various regions, including North and South America, APAC, and EMEA. Through our marketplaces, we engage in a significant amount of transactional business, and have subscription licenses totalling in the millions.”
On the future?
What do you hope to achieve in the next six to 12 months?
“That’s a relatively straightforward goal for us. Ultimately, our objective is to establish a strong presence for our company within the EMEA region and globally within our industry. We have an initial pipeline of business opportunities, and we are already making progress towards achieving it. To accomplish this, we have launched a tool to assist merchants in accessing affordable solutions, which will further enhance our reputation and visibility.”
What are your routes to the market?
“CloudBlue has strong roots in direct selling, which is our primary focus. We have a close working relationship with the Ingram Micro team and collaborate closely with lead partners. Our business primarily comes from direct sales efforts. However, we also value relationships that provide us with a welcoming entry point, particularly when partners bring us opportunities through their platforms.”
Acquisitions
In the past, CloudBlue has made several acquisitions. Are you looking through any acquisitions in the UK?
“There’s nothing on the roadmap. You mentioned recent acquisitions, obviously, Keenondots being the last one, which has given us the ability to go full cloud with the product. That’s doing really well for us. From a global perspective, many more people are going to the cloud for the offering, as opposed to an on-premise type solution.
“At the moment, there’s nothing on the radar certainly from a UK perspective, that’d be something that’s more HQ driven than locally.”
Challenges
What are your challenges?
“There’s a list. It’s probably the classic one right now. The brand hides underneath Ingram a little bit. It’s great if you are promoting CloudBlue, but it’s a hidden secret. We’ve got to unwrap that for many people so that CloudBlue is synonymous with being the platform for a subscription business. It’s getting people to understand that we do stand-alone from Ingram. And we operate with Ingram competitors in some countries because we have our own P&L.
“The other is we’re dealing with technology. This is such a fast-moving area with all the different vendors. Every client and prospect we go after has different internal pressures and challenges. Not everyone sells the same catalogue of products. If you’re a classic telco or classic distributor, your area of focus for the coming two years may be slightly different.
“Some may be focused on a mid-market, some may be focused on an enterprise market, and there are different products in that space. We try and give a rounded view of all of that. It’s great having a vendor portfolio of up to 400 customers and the ability to custom integrate things.”
What are your customers’ challenges?
“I think at the moment, everyone’s looking at trying to do more certainly with less. It’s great when people are growing. But bottom line performance is still key. That’s something across all companies. The classic one in the telco and MSP space is agility. There is still talk about, we need transforming, we need a digital transformation. When you dive a bit deeper, what does that mean? Well, it means we’ve got to cut some costs, we’ve got to make it a lower cost of transaction, and how do we do that?
“We’ve got customers who’ve got solutions that are wholly on-premise, and they don’t actually cover what’s required. There is still a lot of manual intervention. We can transform some of those processes where, for example, if you control a Microsoft catalogue, that catalogue has 3000 SKUs in it. That’s updated, typically monthly, but at least quarterly. Updating 3000 lines manually will typically give you a 5 to 10% error rate. That could be an expensive mistake for someone doing 100 million Microsoft licences a year.
“We drive that level of transformation for organisations who want that integration so that those updates, those price changes, those SKU line changes are all automated from the source. I’m not saying we’re going to a zero-touch model, but you’re going to have a model that has less human error and a lot more speed in getting it done because that flows through the whole supply chain.”
The book question
What was the latest book you read? And what was your takeout for business from it?
“I’m very much still aligned to my classic side of things, which is sales. I re-read, The Challenger Sale (The Challenger Sale: How To Take Control of the Customer Conversation, by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, Amazon Aus, UK, US) because I thought it was very relevant to what we are doing. It was good to go back over some of those scenarios and how you have to think a little bit differently.”
