Laurent - stock.adobe.com
SCC to invest £100m into ramping up AI capabilities
Channel player outlines multi-year plan to bolster its position as a key technology supplier
SCC has outlined its ambitions to invest up to £100m in artificial intelligence (AI) over the next five years, as the channel player ramps up its expertise and ability to support customers.
The firm’s Project Sirius operates across five core areas that are all connected to AI: infrastructure factories, security, digital workplace, AI solutions and hyperscaler marketplaces.
As well as developing external services for customers, SCC will also be investing heavily internally to increase its own use of AI and its levels of expertise.
Those internal investments include hiring 100 staff across the UK, France, Spain and the Middle East to deliver AI support. Some of those staff will be working out of the firm’s Advanced Technology Centres in Birmingham and Paris.
The business is also cutting the ribbon on a global AI division to be the focus of project delivery.
Robert Vassoyan, group CEO at SCC, said the firm had constantly evolved its proposition over its 50-plus years of existence and that Project Sirius was in that tradition.
“The company has been able to go through all these waves of change and disruption,” he said. “It’s probably because we’ve constantly adapted and think that the company has its own way of adapting.”
Critical areas
Vassoyan added that the five areas it has identified were those that were “critical” to its customers, and that it wanted to develop the best capabilities in those areas, with a depth of offering that goes beyond just using AI to increase employee productivity in a superficial way. A great deal of that knowledge will emerge from the lessons it will learn internally about the benefits of using AI to transform the business.
“If we’re really serious about AI ROI, we have to see how we can use it to transform our own most fundamental business processes,” he said. “We’ve decided to embark on this journey, which is going to be a multi-year journey, because this is the core of the company, to really adapt and transform our end-to-end quote-to-cash process.
“This goes from getting orders from the customers, getting quotes from the vendors, bringing in the orders in the system, taking them through the whole supply chain and logistics, and then invoicing and collecting cash, involving hundreds of people,” said Vassoyan.
He said the aim of Project Sirius was to get SCC into a stronger position around AI so it could help its wide range of customers adopt and benefit from the technology.
“We will help our customers select the right use cases and then design them, and then implement them, and at one point manage this agentic orchestration and security for them,” said Vassoyan, adding that customers also need the infrastructure and security it provides.
He said that underneath the plans was a long-standing policy of ensuring SCC remained a trusted advisor to its customers and was able to provide the support and guidance they were looking for.
“The quality of the relationship with our customers, that’s the most important thing,” said Vassoyan.
James Rigby, chairman of SCC, also framed the investment as one that would bring the channel player closer to its customer base.
“Project Sirius represents a milestone in our mission to simplify the complex for our customers,” he said. “This investment allows us to create high-value AI jobs and supercharge our internal capabilities, ensuring we deliver the most powerful AI solutions on the market.”
