Daisy Group CEO Neil Muller has placed customer adoption of cloud technology at the centre of his strategy to power the success and growth of UK business.
Addressing more than 1,500 delegates at Microsoft’s ‘Future Decoded’ event at London’s Excel (Wednesday), Muller described cloud as “a better and fundamentally new way of doing things.” And he called on businesses of all sizes to switch on to the transformational opportunities cloud technology presents.
Daisy Group announced last month that it had become Microsoft’s biggest UK partner in offering the Azure platform to its customers.
In a ‘Future Decoded’ on-stage one-to-one Q&A with Microsoft Executive Vice President Julia White entitled: ‘Getting Going on Azure Solutions’, Muller said: “Talking about cloud as another product is a mistake. Cloud is a whole new way of working.”
And he insisted that success in leveraging the cloud’s potential to positively disrupt ways of working depends on a “cultural” change, not just a technological one.
“Our customers occupy all sectors – small and mid-market, public and private,” he said. “They are traditional British businesses, not ‘born in the cloud’ businesses like UBER, NETFLIX or Airbnb.
“But they are far more engaged with technology development than you might think. We’ve just completed our annual digital survey and the numbers of small and medium-sized businesses with a digital strategy has doubled in the last year. Sixty per cent of them have a clear digital strategy compared to 30% last year with the majority outlining a ‘cloud-first’ approach. Like any significant change in a business, at its heart is the need for change. And this requires strong leadership, from the very top.
“The cloud fundamentally changes the speed at which products and services can evolve; which is everything in the modern business world.”
Signposting a path to growth for UK Plc, Muller also emphasised the role wider digital technology still has to play.
“It’s obvious I’m a big fan of cloud and what it can do for business,” he said.
“But I am not yet advocating the cloud as the answer to everything. It’s still about balance. That’s where organisations like Daisy come in – helping customers work out that balance between the traditional and cloud: bringing our decades of experience of traditional IT to our new experiences with Azure. And all wrapped in a next-generation managed service in order for businesses to get value from their data, and for it to be protected and safe. It’s about finding the balance between having your head buried in the sand, or all the way up in the clouds. Somewhere in the middle is right.”