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PCR speaks to director and deputy chief operating officer Shalen Sehgal from the PCR Award- winning MSP Transputec about the varied elements of the business and plans for the post-Brexit future.
Congratulations on winning at the PCR Awards. How did it feel to be announced as a winner as top MSP?
It was absolutely fantastic, it felt really great. Over the last two years our company has been going through quite a prescribed and focused strategy, and one aspect of that was trying to get highlighted for some of the hard work we’re doing.
Introduce Transputec for those who might not be so familiar with what you do.
Transputec is a just-over £20 million business in terms of turnover and we have three business units. One is a reseller – a VAR. The second is a service provider. And the third is a development service provider.
I look after the service provider and the development service provider which govern around £8 million of turnover. The rest of the £12 million comes from the VAR business unit that COO Mark Nightingale looks after.
What are the differences between the VAR and the service sides of the business?
Our tagline is: ‘we translate complex services into simple product solutions delivered by a team of responsive people’. In terms of what our business offers, as well as selling end-to-end hardware and software solutions from the big vendors that we work with – such as IBM, Lenovo, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft and VMware on our VAR side – we also have a range of what I would call traditional infrastructure services. Services like our help desk, for example, where we offer end-user support, or help for the individuals that are using the IT services.
We offer support for their environment, whether it be something as simple as a password reset to something slightly more complex that is affecting a larger group of users. We also have traditional IT outsourcing services which we label in our own and hopefully understandable language for our industry: end-user support (EUS), infrastructure management services – this is to do with the looking after and backing up of data and maintaining the hosting of servers, and also we have networks communication and security.
The part of our business that is really flourishing is our security practice. Over the past year we’ve introduced a number of security vendors into our portfolio on offer to our customers, and that business has seen very large revenue growth of over 100 per cent year-on-year. The reason for that is a combination of sales marketing and management efforts and the product design. At all levels we’ve come up with very attractive security offerings.
The journey for the next three years will be to expand our customer base and to see continued, sustained growth for the security business, which I believe is one of the reasons we won at the PCR Awards.
What other plans do you have for the next three years and beyond?
The company is run by three business unit directors who all have quite a generous plan on growth and strategy. On the VAR side there is quite an aggressive geographical expansion plan, with Transputec looking to expand into Europe – Spain, Italy and Germany initially – in order to enable us to do more business with our growing customer base.
Has Brexit affected those plans much?
Not really, no. Having a global business with offices across four locations around the world, and also customers in lots of different places, has meant that we ultimately hold a lot of currencies and our strategy has worked out well so far.
I think Brexit will create opportunities as well as remove them from our opportunity landscape – lots of which are currently unknown. But I believe it will create slightly better opportunities potentially in non-European parts of the world. Perhaps the effect of Brexit coming in will help the pound recover which will be a bad thing from today’s scenario where we are over 30 per cent cheaper than the rest of the world because of our weak exchange rate.
But the reality of the matter is that nobody really knows what will happen until it actually starts to happen. I believe that we’ve built Transputec to be very agile so we will be able to adapt dynamically to the landscape that unfolds in front of us.
