Agilitas CEO Shaun Lynn aims to bring inventory to the masses having completed an MBO and appointed industry veteran Tom Kelly as Chairman.
In June 2014 Lynn led an MBO along with NVM Private Equity from the previous backers Acal Enterprise Solutions. Completing the MBO and then assembling a 'great team' ranks as Lynn's biggest career achievement to date. Most notably, two high profile hires are certain to boost Lynn's growth ambitions, having on-boarded former Logicalis chief Tom Kelly as the new Chairman (who described Agilitas as the 'IT industry's best kept secret'), and Richard Eglon as Marketing Director who joined from channel services firm Comms-care. The appointments are astute, with Kelly adding more clout to how the business is perceived and Eglon chomping at the bit to further raise the company's profile and 'get its message out there'.
Agilitas is a European provider of supply chain solutions focused on delivering services to the server, storage and networking marketplace. Its portfolio of support services include risk mitigation, service inventory management, training, repair, technical support, IMACs and hardware sales. The company traditionally focused on pan-European OEMs, large service providers, resellers and system integrators, and is now developing its services proposition in line with the evolving OEM roadmaps, market trends and the changing demands of customers for enhanced services and offerings.
The Nottingham-based inventory management specialist was set up in 1991 and known as Computer Parts International, operating as a parts sales business focusing on IBM mid-range and high-end products. Steady growth and various reincarnations through the 1990s and early 2000s saw the addition of HP and IBM Wintel product ranges to the services portfolio.
"From 2003 onwards the focus was on the development and implementation of a customer driven annuity business model, then rolling it out through customers such as StorageTek, Bull and Phoenix IT," explained Lynn. "This led to a fully outsourced inventory model launched to the market in 2012. Today, Agilitas supports some of the UK's leading OEMs, resellers and managed services providers as IT firms look to benefit from the Inventory-as-a-Service proposition."
In its 2014 financial year Agilitas increased revenues from £6.2 million to £7 million and upped the headcount to 71 from 54. The company expects to reach £9.1 million revenues this year and add more staff, with £11.8 million budgeted for financial year 2016 along with a projected increase in headcount from 78 to 87.
The market influences most strongly felt by Agilitas include the need to simplify complex products and product life cycle management, core to context evolution, the rising adoption of cloud and the requirements of large service companies moving away from the traditional reseller-distributor model to develop their own services proposition. "We aim to change the mindset that having access to high quality service and expertise isn't as costly as IT firms perceive it to be," said Lynn.
His time in IT began as a graduate hire at IBM UK in the global services strategic outsourcing division where he spent six years in a variety of commercially focused roles supporting some of Europe's largest outsources such as C&W, NTL, JPMC, Defra, ABN Amro and Astra Zenecca. Lynn was then recruited by Sun Microsystems soon after the StorageTek acquisition as Head of Delivery Partner Management and Multi-Vendor Services. This involved a strategic focus on the insourcing of multi-vendor activity with an emphasis on moving up the value stack offering around OEM services.
"The highlight during my time at Sun was creating the largest and most profitable Sun/Oracle multi-vendor business unit worldwide," said Lynn. "In my current role I spend much of my time focusing on working with clients to identify what is core to them and their customers, and what is on the periphery. From my perspective, having the technical skills to fix a customer's issue and to take ownership is core to a business, while owning the spares inventory and managing the logistics function is periphery. This is where Agilitas can add value and support their requirements."
Lynn hopes to transform the perception of IT spares management by making the IT market more agile. He believes that reactive parts buying is mostly inefficient and clunky, rarely delivering the value that the end users crave. So Lynn is working hard to create deeper customer relationships, understanding their needs and challenges, while selling based on creating value with greater emphasis on the indirect benefits that truly make a difference, such as service.
Agilitas' credentials are impressive, offering multi-vendor hardware support, third line engineering fly and fix services, a technical help desk, engineer training, test and repair services. It boasts 85 forward stocking locations throughout Europe, supporting 'always-on' two to four hour parts-to-site SLAs, achieving a 99 per cent hit rate. The company is one of the largest stockists of data centre hardware in Europe with over £6 million of multi-vendor service inventory covering in excess of 75,000 parts.
Commenting on the next phase of growth for the company, Lynn noted: "For many years we have delivered inventory management services for some of Europe's leading OEMs and service providers. We have expanded our services portfolio in line with customer demand and will continue to do so. However, with the addition of Tom Kelly we have someone who is already driving us forward in getting ahead of the curve."•