Platinum Partner of the Year: Synapse360
Synapse360 was acquired by Manx Telecom in 2019, at which time Steve Douglas took over as managing director. Since then the Manchester-based firm has looked to switch from selling kit to running a services business.
“We’ve been working with Dell Bank over the last two years to transform everything that we do into a service. That’s really hit a sweet spot with customers,” said Douglas.
“CIOs don’t like asking for £2 million with capital investment. It’s not the way people buy cars; it’s not the way people think of IT anymore. They think of cloud. They think of subscribing. They go online and say, ‘I’ll have a little bit of their service.’”
Synapse360, he said, has been transforming its infrastructure and storage offerings into subscription-based services.
“It’s worked out really well for us. We did have a great year last year. Hopefully we’ll continue to have one,” he said.
“Synapse had just a breakout year last year,” said Rob Tomlin, VP, UK channel for Dell Technologies. “We grew from strength to strength in customer acquisition, the technology lines. Their reputation amongst our Dell seller community just goes from strength to strength. We’ve got many very good platinum partners and the platinum tier grew last year. Synapse were just head and shoulders [ahead].”
Douglas said it was “a strategic decision” for Synapse360 to work exclusively with Dell in certain areas of the business.
“We’re not big enough to go out and be big with lots of vendors. So really, we’re concentrating on Dell. Historically, it’s worked well for us. It gives us credibility when we go in to see a customer for the first time to be able to go in arm-in-arm with Dell. Everyone’s heard of Dell. So it’s important to us to be able to go in and say, ‘This is what gives us credibility. This is why we should be at the table. This is why you should be talking to Synapse360.’
“We’ve got some innovative ideas of how we might push the boundaries of that over the next six months and maybe do something even closer together. And if we can manage that without upsetting other Dell partners, then I think that we can really do a good piece of business together.”