Head in the cloud, feet on the ground for Manchester IT boss

James Doggart is CEO of Cloud Technology Solutions, a high growth Manchester-based IT company. James, 43, has spent his entire career in IT, initially in sales before developing into senior management roles. CTS has developed extremely rapidly, gaining over 1,000,000 users in the last two years. September saw monthly turnover top £500K for the first time. James has built the organisation to 20 staff and is expecting to double again over the coming 12 months. Here, he takes Bdaily behind the business.

What key challenges has your company faced?

Managing growth within the scale of the opportunity has been challenging. The cloud has changed everything in IT sales; you can prospect for sales anywhere but the skill is in allocating sales and support priorities – you still need some degree of representation in a physical channel to penetrate an overseas market, particularly where another language than English is primary.

We have enjoyed tremendous organic growth. The cloud is coming and to a certain extent growth for us is assured as we offer a very convincing way to take your computing into the cloud. But you are always conscious that not seeking to make it go faster is risking a waste of precious opportunity.

But when you seek to actively drive sales, they can come in lumpily – or not at all! It’s a question of throwing enough fuel on the growth fire but always being careful that it isn’t your core business that goes up in smoke over cashflow and being too resource stretched!

Another challenge is that one which always faces IT companies away from the primary hub, which is the U.S., or secondary hubs like Berlin, Sydney or London. It is always easier when major corporate partners, channel partners, skills bases and marketing/media presence is there on your doorstep.

We spend a lot of time out and about travelling – I’m currently wrestling with the justification for going ahead and opening a U.S. office sooner rather than later.

What is your biggest acheivement over the past 12 months?

We’ve gone from a raw startup to having a real, rounded and functional organisational team in place. We’ve been taking on a new member staff recently every couple of weeks, from all functions and at all levels of seniority.

Sometimes you fear that it’s all going to sag down into chaos but then you look around and see that there is something buzzing away in front of you that is suddenly much, much more than the sum of its individual parts.

This is where your confidence and ambition comes from; the realisation that high performing teams can win huge marketplace presence.

What is your most important focus for the coming year, and what do you hope to achieve?

We started out as a single product company, which was a great way to gain traction and respect. That can be a much stronger starting position than launching as a services company and seeking to productise, which can be a very long road.

However, single product companies remain very vulnerable in two key respects. Firstly, incumbent major corporates can keep you squeezed out simply by their mass in the marketplace and, secondly, you will always be benchmarked exactly against your various competitors on every permutation of performance and price, which is very tiring on a day to day basis.

Over the last year we have been actively seeking to diversify, developing width across the underlying technologies with which we interact, and depth in our penetration of the enterprise IT stack.

Presence and reputation start to multiply within IT when you can genuinely start to talk of a “platform” offering. We are actively now starting to push out into a platform around collaboration and co-operation software and this is my own big thing for the next 12 months.

What excites you most about your industry and business?

Innovation and market possibilities are where the big rushes come.

Innovation can come very, very quickly when you and your team bring good ideas together into a great idea. The product emerges, literally, line by line and you can have a working demonstration in weeks, or even just days. Traditional industrial restrictions of massive capital commitment and long R&D cycles simply don’t apply. The flipside of that is that you need to be very rigorous about what to pursue so that you don’t end up being busy fools in a chaos of opportunity.

In terms of market possibilities, big cyclical changes roll around in IT, creating periodic massive opportunities for the nimble, talented and quick. We’ve been quick to date – now we’ll begin to find out how nimble we are in keeping on the wave and how talented we are in developing the position we’ve just managed to establish!

What do you wish you had known when starting out?

That it will never be perfect and you mustn’t let that stop you seeking out the best option in every moment and executing decisively on it. The business books by non-businesspeople emphasise acting on static certainty; business is actually about best judgement in a totally dynamic environment.

What will be the “next big thing“ in your industry, and how do you plan to handle it?

The IT vendor chain is changing, just as the behaviour of purchasers is changing. Server-based monolithic IT stacks are being replaced by lighter Software as a Service models. Multi-year lock-in arrangements with the big IT suppliers and systems integrators are under pressure to loosen. And corporate purchasers are becoming smarter, educated through Bring Your Own Device experiences and robust out-of-workplace that technology should be a utility, not a stranglehold.

This process will take a number of years yet to work through into a model where IT is rented on a much more transparent basis directly from vendors who will need to be much more explicit about their offerings.

The challenge for CTS is to continue to develop sufficient partnerships and strategic relationships to scale around the existing “old world”, while driving even higher levels of innovation and utility to maintain and strengthen our presence in the “new world” of IT.

We’ll need to keep our feet firmly on the ground to scale the fullest heights of the cloud!