The CEO Edit: 2023 for Servium

Simply put, it’s been a strong year for Servium and our clients. We’ve grown our team and seen significant growth within our services business – for that, I’m incredibly grateful to our employees and roster of customers. After what has been an uncertain few years for the business community, it feels good to head into 2024 on a high and look forward with confidence. 

In terms of customer strategy, we’ve seen some familiar trends throughout 2023. Notably: organisations doubling down on their data centres, refreshing infrastructures that were unexpectedly extended during COVID, and welcoming back workloads repatriated from the public cloud. Networking and edge compute have equally been innovation hotspots.  

Thankfully, everything listed above has signalled a pivot away from the obsessive focus on client devices which overshadowed the period during and immediately following the pandemic. This year has been all about the projects that were put on hold but are now very much vital for the continued growth, efficiency and security of organisations – music to my ears! 

Spicing up security and storage

October saw Servium customers old and new converge on the iconic Cinnamon Club in Westminster for our face-to-face A Taste for Technology event. It was fantastic to have 30+ industry leaders in the same room, making the most of networking and fine dining opportunities while also learning about hybrid cloud essentials – in particular, on-premises infrastructure-as-a-service from HPE, and securing data no matter what cloud it’s in with Arcserve.  

I’d like to personally extend a huge thanks to everyone who came along. I know you’re all very busy and time comes at a premium, which is why we endeavour to curate events that really hit the mark in terms of both valuable insight and experiential impact. With that in mind, do make sure you keep your eyes peeled for details of our next meet-up.  

The smart take on AI

Undoubtedly the industry’s most divisive buzzword… So, what is there to say? Over the past year, AI has continued to be a transformative force for business processes, products, and decision-making. From intelligent automation at scale, freeing humans from repetitive tasks, to uncovering data insights that inform forecasting, risk assessment, predictive maintenance, and demand planning, it’s become less of a trend and more of an essential.  

That being said, I’m pleased to note that an increasing number of customers are adopting a more critical approach to this much-hyped technology. While AI undoubtedly has its benefits, which include cutting costs and boosting efficiency, it’s important to remember that the output is only ever as valuable as the input – and 2023 has certainly produced plenty of cautionary AI tales. If you’re still unsure as to how AI can benefit your business, reach out to the Servium team for a no-nonsense discussion.

Europen for business

As an ardent problem solver, one of the highlights of my year was the establishment of Servium GmbH. Alongside two new procurement routes, our German entity will not only make it easy for UK customers and their subsidiaries to supply products, services, and software across mainland Europe, but will also alleviate the many challenges the industry has endured since Brexit.  

With sobering conflicts across Eastern Europe and the Middle East raising concerns around international trade and logistics, the world can seem a very disconnected place. We feel privileged to be in a position where we can build international business links and offer UK customers the opportunity to once again ship goods from door-to-door across Europe, with the minimum of friction. Find out more about our GmbH offering here.

Servium-level service

We’ve always focused heavily on our service offering, and it’s great to see that investment reflected in the fantastic feedback from our client satisfaction questionnaire (CSQ). Of particular note: 

• 100% of respondents are either satisfied or extremely satisfied.
• 92% of respondents rated their account manager as ‘excellent’, while 7% rated ‘good’. 

I’m very proud to see those numbers, and even prouder that there’s no big secret behind it all. I firmly believe this is the result of the strong partnerships we forge with our clients, which in turn help them to continue moving their business forward. Long may it continue! 

Seeing is achieving

We’ve seen a sharp increase in the focus on technologies that help observe what’s going on in an organisation’s tech ecosystem, as highlighted in our recent observability blog.

When people talk to me about moving workloads, rearchitecting and refactoring, I’m conscious they’re potentially breaking applications down into countless small pieces and then scattering them all around the Internet. As great as that is for economics and performance, when problems arise, the first question is: where is the source? And where do I start looking? Of course, the usual go-to monitoring tools are no longer up to the job… 

This is an incredibly interesting area of emerging tech which ultimately boils down to understanding the inherent complexity of modern multi-cloud and hybrid cloud setups – every resource, every item of infrastructure, and every hop, step and jump in your network. With data spread out from edge to cloud, businesses need better tools to be able to manage and observe operations – which is where observability tools such as HPE OpsRamp can really shine. 

2024: what's in store...

I’m not in the habit of playing Mystic Meg when it comes to industry trends. But what I can say for certain is that you’ll be hearing a lot more about green/sustainable tech, IoT, the metaverse and quantum computing in the coming months. There’s also the continuing pre-eminence of cloud, which, despite market momentum, is still a path many businesses are yet to travel. Without giving too much away, you can always count on the Servium blog to keep you in the know, and I’ll be sharing another CEO Edit early next year. 

Until then, I hope you and yours take time to enjoy the festive season as 2023 draws to a close.