Brexit has accelerated move to services

The silver lining of the Brexit uncertainty is that it might accelerate some of the pre-existing trends that were already driving resellers towards more services.

With some customers opting to pause on investment plans because of the lack of clarity around what sort of departure the UK will have from the EU at the end of March, it is giving some in the channel the chance to focus more on services.

Providing support to maintain the existing infrastructure is one of the options for those channel players that are looking for decent revenue growth in 2019.

LAN3 provides one example of a infrastructure player that has made a conscious effort to increase its services offering over the past six months. But the firm, which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2018, always had plans to ramp up that side of the business.

Steve Thompson, one of the co-founders of networking specialist LAN3, said that it was reacting to the current market conditions by coming up with something different to talk to customers about.

“Customers like that they can still maintain what they have already invested in, and we are going back to our 600 customers and selling them other services,” he said.

In the past few months, the firm has hired a head of services and increased its engineers and the capabilities of its support desk.

“We have the skills and services around the existing infrastructure to help the customers keep the lights on and support it. We have put a lot of investment behind it,” he said.

He added that although the company had reacted to the Brexit uncertainty by widening its offering, it had made it clear six months ago that it had always intended to increase its services provision for customers. “The service driven business is the right way to go,” he said.

Quite what will happen with Brexit is still not clear as the politicians try to trash out a deal that pleases all sides, but there might be more clarity next week when the Prime Minister puts the latest version of the plan to parliament.