Timico’s rebrand into Digital Space was driven by its expansion beyond its SMB telco heritage, said CEO Neil Muller.
Muller told UC Today that he joined the Horizon Capital-backed managed service provider (MSP) two and a half years ago in order to transform it into a “relevant” partner for larger corporate customers. This first step away from its heritage was the acquisition in 2019 of Atos IT Outsourcing Services, which gave it immediate capability with enterprise customers, marking its first shift away from the SMB market.
This was followed by the deal to acquire Arcus Cloud Solutions at the tail end of 2020, which gave the MSP cloud and DevOps capabilities and was a “fundamental piece of our jigsaw”, according to Muller.
“The reason for the rebrand is that Timico had this very good heritage as an SMB telco, but we’re far more than that now, and therefore it was the right time [to change the name],” he explained.
“The Digital Space name came from data being the new currency in business – when you think of data you think digital. ‘Space’ came from this terminology of there being a gap in the marketplace for an organisation like ourselves to not only digitally transform organisations but to also look after their legacy infrastructure as well.
“That’s a really important point in terms of our whole strategy – we want to be known as being the digital transformer”
Muller is nonchalant about the pandemic’s influence on the accelerated rate of digital transformation, saying that it’s not a reason for Digital Space’s success nor for the challenges it faces. If anything, it has shown that the market now demands that providers be able to cater logistically to their customers’ needs, as well as offering subscription-based services.
“Broadly speaking over the last few decades, there have been three business models: you’ve either been a services provider, a manufacturer, or a merchandiser/ wholesale,” he stated.
“You’ve got to be more than that nowadays; the key thing for me is to be customer value obsessed and to be able to offer subscription-based computing modelling, and traditional business models and all the other factors that go along with those.”
The rebrand into Digital Space also came with the lofty ambition of becoming the UK’s leading cloud services provider for public sector and enterprise customers. Muller is confident it will attain this goal in the next few years as the company serves a “niche” area.
“Our chosen target market is corporate organisations, circa 500 to 5000 users and I think that’s a gap in the marketplace that exists,” he said.
“it’s a nice niche area that you’ve got to have good capability in order to exist in that space, but you also need to be agile and flexible enough to be able to operate in it. It’s a space that I think is underserved by many of the larger organisations – whether that be management consultants, system integrators, or large value-added resellers – who are focused on much larger customers”
“It’s about being big enough to cope but small enough to care; it’s about having the capable, broad, converged capability, whilst also having DevOps agility in order to be fleet of foot.”
