Stewart Smythe is well known for picking up floundering telco Energis and achieving a break-even deal two years later when it was sold. He went on to reposition C&W Worldwide over an 18 month period and was at the vanguard of a successful demerger and flotation of the company in 2011. With these impressive credentials snuggly under his belt, Smythe is now busy building another solid reputation as the CEO and driving force behind fast growing managed services provider Adapt.
Adapt was founded in 2001 as an independent provider of IT and network services with a big vision. Originally branded Mnet, the organisation started life as the IT services division of a larger business and quickly grew before rebranding as Adapt in early 2007. In the same year it acquired network services provider Centric Telecom, a move that doubled the firm's revenues and instigated new levels of operating efficiency. "In 2008, as part of our transition to full managed services provision, we also acquired Centre Core, the managed services division of News International, giving the business a step change in its technical and operational capability," explained Smythe.
Still in buying mode, Adapt acquired Cardiff-based eLINIA last year and two months ago snapped up Sleek, a Leeds-based cloud-hosting company. Adapt now employs 180 people and has revenues of £45 million. In 2010 its success was recognised for a fourth consecutive year in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 league table which lists the fastest growing privately owned TMT businesses in the UK. "We plan to treble our profits in the next three years," added Smythe.
"Half of this will come from our existing account base and half from new business. As we continue to grow we want to be known as the company our customers are proud to tell people about because we help them achieve more, designing the right solutions, customised and aligned precisely with real-world commercial outcomes and objectives, delivered by the right people. Ultimately, we want to deliver change and innovation to our customers' businesses that has a visible impact on their bottom line."
The majority of Adapt's mid-term growth will be organic, but Smythe doesn't rule out the possibility of future acquisitions provided they offer expertise and capabilities that match the company's existing vision for service excellence and operational purity, noted Smythe. "Over the last 12 months we have been through a massive period of change. However, we keep focusing on the relationships we have with our customers, keeping them close, going beyond the line of duty to help them accomplish their own business goals," he added.
Adapt helps customers like the National Trust, OCS Group, LOVEFiLM and PKR to navigate their way through the evolution of their computing environment, helping them to achieve their business objectives through affordable, scalable virtual and cloud based solutions. "Customers of all sizes are now getting comfortable with the cloud and are starting to really understand it," commented Smythe. "With this knowledge comes higher expectations, which in turn makes customers more demanding. They will also find it easier to work out who is good and who is not and the reasons why. This will lead to a lot of company churn and consolidation in the coming few years. I am excited about the opportunities in the market and what this will mean for Adapt."
In 2008 Adapt began its transition to a fully managed services provider. Its success in the market was noticed by PE company Lyceum Capital Partners and in 2011 it secured £30 million backing, closely followed by the appointment of a new senior management team including Smythe. "At the moment there are four or five providers that turnover about £50 million and then there is a gap to the big providers that turn over £300 million," he added. "We are positioning the company to step into that gap and offer our specialist expertise to the larger mid-sized companies across the UK."
A key part of achieving this goal is the company ethos Smythe has encouraged. "We have created a culture of ownership and encourage every team member to use their initiative to help deliver the best service to our customers," he stated. "This means that every customer gets individual attention from their own personal account manager and technical support team."
Adapt has a number of technology partners including NetApp, EMC and Cisco. Its channel partners include companies like BT and some of the smaller channel resellers around the UK. This is a focus area for the next year, particularly in the public sector space through the G-Cloud framework. Adapt operates a Service Development Framework which involves a wide range of internal business areas, strategic partners and customers working together to help drive its future strategy.
"Our immediate roadmap looks exciting and includes launching the next generation of our eVDC platform, which is now two years old," explained Smythe. "It's been a great success. We've onboarded an impressive portfolio of customers to date and we're still going strong. We are broadening the service capabilities of the eVDC to increase performance, improve customer choice, reduce cost and keep pace with strategic partner developments."
Adapt is also sharply focused on optimising service management and redeveloping its management portal to provide a more feature rich experience to customers, channel partners and internal business units. "This will include expanding our use of automation and orchestration technologies and simpler 'proof of concept, try before you buy' capabilities to meet the market's needs," added Smythe.
"For businesses looking to consume commodity public cloud services while benefiting from Adapt's service management wrap and expertise, we will be launching new aggregation services, broadening our service portfolio to meet the needs of some of our smaller mid-market customers. We will also continue to expand our channel offerings including services managed through our eVDC platform. Customers are getting smarter, they know what they want and it's time the service industry realised this before it's too late."•
Incom Business Systems Sales Director Grant Counsell aims to run 98 kilometres across the country in aid of Cancer Research. Having been hand-picked by Vodafone JustTextGiving to take on its Fittest Fundraiser challenge, he is being put to the test by running seven of Nova's Great Run Series events.