Logicalis - Annual Review 2013

, Jul 11, 2013

Download the Annual Review HERE.

CEO Statement

I am pleased to report a record year for Logicalis, with increased revenues and margins in almost every region and significant growth in the revenues of our services business of 14%, which has overall improved our services mix and margin stability.

In particular, our annuity service revenues were up 16% and reflected the long-term strategic focus on growing services. Both in North America and the UK, markets saw steady growth in demand for hosted cloud services, and strong growth for private cloud infrastructure and services. All Logicalis regions benefited from the emerging demand for business mobility solutions and services.

The launch of our common services portfolio and delivery framework has, furthermore, established a solid services platform to build on. Again, I would like to thank all of our employees in all countries for their hard work and commitment in achieving these results, and to give a special thank-you to our customers, partners and stakeholders, whose support is greatly valued.

Strategy

The IT trends that we referenced last year continue to drive the ICT market: collaboration, personal device proliferation, user mobility, private and public cloud computing, big data and analytics, and new ICT consumption and operational models for data centre infrastructure and enterprise software.

These trends gradually make business units more influential in the IT spend and decision making process, and this in turn is placing new demands on IT leadership to focus a greater part of their resources on business-outcome led engagements.

As a result, IT solution providers such as Logicalis are increasingly being asked to support a wider and more varied engagement with clients.

As well as providing traditional technology expertise, Logicalis is investing in building solutions and services based ever more on new consumption-based models. This is creating greater opportunity for consulting services, managed services and cloud services.

This year sees the launch of Logicalis’ Optimal Services: a suite of services that span business productivity services and technology and operational services.

Business productivity services bring agility and choice to organisations looking to exploit the very latest in unified communications, video and collaboration tools whether at the desk, in the home or on a smart mobile device.

Technology, infrastructure and operational services help IT departments to deploy, build, operate or consume core IT systems or services with minimal risk and maximum operational efficiency, whether that be data centre capacity in their own data centre or from the cloud, or communications networks in the office, between locations or new mobile business environments.

Our strategy of building strong customer intimacy continues to enable us to grow our relationships and solution and service engagements with existing clients.

Adding value to vendor partners is also critical to Logicalis’ strategy. Helping our clients meet the oncoming opportunity of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and mobility played a large part in our 2012/13 strategy. Working across all 20 (at the time of engagement) Logicalis countries, and supported by investment from Cisco, Logicalis launched a best-in-class industry framework for mobility – the Logicalis Mobility Experience Framework. Bringing expertise from Logicalis and Cisco together in a single framework not only demonstrated industry thought leadership, but also provided significant value to customers, helping them accelerate and de-risk their own mobility strategies from device to business productivity applications.

Our continued commitment to leadership and technical excellence has been recognised again by our key vendors for the year under review:

  •  In 2013, at the Cisco Partner Summit, Logicalis was presented with 14 regional, theatre and country awards from Cisco across Latin America and Europe.
  • Logicalis US was also awarded the IBM Growth Leadership Award for 2012.

Looking ahead

The operational priority for the coming year is to continue to demonstrate the value of ICT to our customers. We will maintain our focus on investing and innovating in our main areas of growth – data centre and unified communications and collaboration solutions, cloud services, and managed services. We see trends such as cloud, mobility, BYOD, business analytics and big data creating new opportunities to further differentiate Logicalis in the market and with its customers.

The global macroeconomic outlook is still mixed and some of our markets will be more difficult than others, however, our customers are generally well-positioned to invest. Logicalis’ management is optimistic about the next financial year and is planning for both revenue and operating profit growth. The Group will continue to seek to make further acquisitions that extend its scale and services business in established markets.

Ian Cook
Chief Executive Officer, Logicalis Group

Related Insights