Two hearts beat within the Cobweb Solutions breast. One is older, deeply experienced and entrenched in its core specialisms. The other is visionary, pioneering, ambitious, youthful, cutting edge and gunning for more growth in partnership with resellers. Setting the drumbeat and leading the charge is industry aficionado and Ex-Microsoft lead Michael Frisby who last month took hold of the reins as Managing Director. Here's his plan of action.
Few Christmas presents, no matter how jaw dropping, have the power to determine the course of a young person's future career. But the minute Frisby unwrapped a Commodore VIC-20 the writing was on the wall, indelibly so once his father's colleague, an IT manager, wrote a version of Breakout for him in two hours. "From that point I was hooked," stated Frisby. "Throughout my education I focused on pursuing a career in technology, studying IT at GCSE and A-Level and completing a degree in computing at Loughborough University."
Frisby built his programming skills initially in Pascal and Visual Basic, working for HP, PA Consulting and then moving to Microsoft in 1996. "My early projects included working on a Heathrow Terminal 5 capacity planning model at HP, and building the first version of Tesco.com in 1996 when I worked for Microsoft Consulting Services," he recalled.
Shortly afterwards, Microsoft created an Internet Customer Unit which Frisby joined, transitioning into a sales and business development role, working with early ISPs, dotcom content providers and hosters. He went on to work with fledging ASPs and among their number was Cobweb. He joined the firm in 2003 as Sales and Marketing Director but in 2008 returned to Microsoft to work with European operators on B2C and B2B services. Frisby remained on the board of Cobweb as a Non-Exec Director.
Between 2010 and 2015 Frisby played a blinder, building the Office 365 Syndication business from nothing to one million users. "This is my biggest career achievement to date," said Frisby. "It involved the recruitment of major western European operators including Telefonica, Vodafone, Telenor, TeliaSonera, KPN and Telecom Italia, and then building a great team that worked with those partners to develop their cloud services portfolios, go-to-market strategies and associated execution."
So when Frisby explains his forecast for Cobweb, envisaging thousands of channel partners reselling hundreds of different cloud services to their customers, it would be wise to take note. "We will get there by focusing on our core capabilities and expertise in delivering a range of both hosted and third party cloud services, along with supporting and building out our network of channel partners," he stated.
Immediately before rejoining Cobweb last month Frisby was responsible for Microsoft's SMB Managed Reseller channel across western Europe, driving the transition to selling cloud services. His efforts and considerable experience in these matters are now being leveraged to the full at Cobweb, a fast growing value added cloud aggregator with annual turnover in excess of £10 million, increasing around 20 per cent year-on-year. Significantly, over 94 per cent of Cobweb's turnover is contracted recurring revenue.
"We are building on our heritage as a long-term Microsoft partner alongside other cloud service vendors such as Symantec and Acronis," commented Frisby. "Our key proposition draws on Cobweb's near 20 years experience and capabilities in hosting and selling cloud services to enable any IT reseller to be a successful cloud solution provider."
Frisby's appointment seems to have opened a new front in cloud service provision, largely based on innovation, scale, experience and partnerships, and his current strategy is three pronged. "The first is to accelerate the recruitment and development of the partner channel," he emphasised. "Secondly, I will focus on expanding the portfolio of cloud services for delivery through the Cobweb marketplace. And we will enhance our existing go-to-market and customer lifecycle management services for partners. Over the last six years I've worked with partners both large and small, enabling them to build new cloud service sales capabilities. I am bringing this experience to Cobweb."
Cobweb's status as a 2-Tier Indirect CSP Partner and the largest independent Hosted Exchange provider in Europe was the magnet that pulled Frisby towards his new leadership role. He will undoubtedly labour valiantly to deliver on his ambitions, no matter how complex the task in hand. But the original premise behind Cobweb was simple - to enable businesses to take advantage of the Internet revolution in the traditional IT landscape. The company was founded in 1996 by Executive Chairman Paul Hannam and Julian Dyer, specialising in Internet connectivity and web hosting services.
The following year Cobweb launched a free B2B ISP service, partnering with the Federation of Small Businesses. In 1999 it developed a Hosted Exchange offering and created the Blue Yonder joint venture partnership with ntl:Telewest to provide hosted IT services to SMBs. Cobweb subsequently purchased control of the joint venture from Telewest in 2007, and passed the 100,000 Hosted Exchange user milestone in 2013.
"We have now expanded our user base in Hosted Exchange to more than 140,000 individual mailboxes spread across over 6,000 different businesses, making us by far the biggest provider outside the US," commented Frisby. "The customer profile has also changed. There was a time when micro-businesses would mainly consume our services, but over the past few years businesses of all sizes have adopted Cobweb's portfolio.
"The shift from being a traditional Hosted Exchange provider towards holistic solutions has been a fundamental change in the company over the last two years. This has allowed Cobweb to be a more business focused advisor to our customers, looking at the bigger picture. This transformation means we can advise and implement a range of services to create solutions that meet business needs and in turn help support our customers' growth and aspirations through liberating technology."
This approach could precipitate the sort of revolution the market is crying out for, hopes Frisby. And his priority is to develop more industry specific solution bundles to make it easier for channel partners to provide a complete cloud-based solution. An area of immediate opportunity is around the Internet of Things (IoT) and leveraging cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure with solutions to help organisations maximise efficiency and provide greater customer insights.
"Many people have heard of the IoT, Big Data, cloud analytics and machine learning, but they aren't sure how to take advantage of them for business success," said Frisby. "We want to build a portfolio of solutions from ISVs and solution providers that will enable any IT reseller to take a slice of the significant opportunity in these areas. Cobweb has always had a partnership approach. The main challenge and opportunity is to grow our network of channel partners within the UK and across Europe. All IT channel partners have existing relationships with many of the large traditional IT distributors. The opportunity for Cobweb is to present our value add cloud aggregator proposition and help them transition to a cloud-first model."
Over time, more and more IT services will be delivered from the cloud, and according to Frisby there is no compromise for resellers and SIs. "They must evolve from being a provider and implementer of these solutions to helping customers maximise the benefits they deliver," he commented. "Mobility and the cloud represent a big opportunity for organisations to change the way they operate by increasing efficiency and flexibility for employees and delivering better experiences for customers.
"Evergreen cloud services will mean the end of one-off upgrade projects. Resellers need to evolve their customer engagement, revenue and profit models to deliver ongoing value and services to end users. Those that make this transition and help customers to unlock the value of their IT investments will be the most successful."
Few companies purely see a gleaming landscape ahead, but Frisby is emblematic of Cobweb's approach towards a brightening outlook for workplace flexibility, underscored by his belief that 'work is something I do, not a place that I go'. "This is true for more organisations and driven by mobility, cloud services and the IoT," he said. "Our mission is to enable partners to help more customers take advantage of these trends. I don't believe in silver bullet solutions, but rather a continuing focus on doing the right things, in the right way, a little bit better every day. And we will be intense in our efforts for excellence in execution." •