The IT Channel Company, an international IT service provider based in the Netherlands, has spent the past two years developing OneBizz, a new, fully integrated business software suite for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As TICC board member and OneBizz CEO Joop van Voorthuijsen explains, this IT solution is highly innovative in a number of ways. While this is excellent news for end users, it also presents a number of challenges for OneBizz’s current channel partners: “Our sector is basically faced with a major HR problem right now.”
It may seem like a contradiction in terms: a CEO of an IT service provider who feels that many businesses spend too much time and financial resources on their IT landscape. Yet Joop van Voorthuijsen has been spreading precisely that message for years. “SME owners should be able to focus on growing their business and mitigating risk, but they can never really give that their all if their IT takes up too much of their time,” he says.
Van Voorthuijsen is the type of man who, if you hand him a marker, will scribble a bunch of quadrants, arrows and circles all over your whiteboard just to make his point. It’s all part of how he gets his message across: no matter how high-quality they might be, all software packages currently available on the market only provide partial solutions to what is essentially a single integrated challenge: running your business as efficiently as possible. “So you end up with a scenario where your typical SME will often use at least four different software solutions from multiple providers. And since these applications don’t actually communicate with each other, employees often need to enter the data twice. So when the crunch comes, you can forget about keeping track of your business in real time – it’s simply not going to happen,” Van Voorthuijsen says. “There’s no getting away from it: the complexity of their IT infrastructure is a great source of frustration for SMEs.”
The IT Channel Company is a conglomerate of operating companies. Within this structure Van Voorthuijsen and his team developed a new comprehensive solution for SMEs called OneBizz. He explains: “OneBizz is unique in that it makes your financial system, sales system, e-mail, back-office and document management available in the cloud and on an integrated basis. So instead of selling our end clients software, we are offering them a comprehensive standardised IT solution as a service. You pay a fee per employee per day – say, the price of a few cups of premium coffee. What you receive in return is high-quality IT support in all areas which is largely tailored in advance to each individual employee, depending on their role. This means you pay only for the functionality you actually need, and for those members of your workforce who are actually making use of the system.”
OneBizz was launched in the Dutch market early this year. As Van Voorthuijsen explains, this was all part of a careful strategy on his company’s part: “Since Dutch SMEs tend to be early adopters of new technologies, the Netherlands was a strategic market for us to launch our product. The fact that our head office is located here also means we can easily monitor the implementation of our product and fine-tune the setup where necessary. I should also add that many Dutch businesses have already adopted Microsoft Office 365 – which serves as the OneBizz productivity platform – and other cloud solutions at this point. The Netherlands is at the forefront in this respect.
” Although this provides fertile soil for a successful rollout, Van Voorthuijsen has found that the combination of cloud-driven software and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offered by OneBizz presents a challenge to current channel partners (that is, resellers): “Your typical IT company is used to working on a project basis: they deliver an application and then bill an X number of consultancy hours for implementation and support services. If that’s been your business model up until this point, switching over to OneBizz is quite a leap; it requires a completely different approach. For one, it’s practically a plug-and-play application, so implementing it takes days rather than months. Besides, the revenue model is not based on the sale of expensive applications and sky-high consultancy fees, but rather on a long-term yet relatively competitively-priced subscription. So that has a significant impact on short-term cash flow.”
OneBizz has therefore taken to proactively supporting existing channel partners in branching out into this innovative new form of IT services. The approach is based on keeping the existing business intact but phasing it out in the long term. In tandem with these efforts, the OneBizz services can be developed and expanded together with a small, dedicated team. Van Voorthuijsen: “This team should preferably include people who were ‘born in the cloud’, as we like to call it – young professionals who bring a fresh new vision of the role of IT to their work.” The CEO is the first to admit that these types of workers are hard to come by in the current market, and therefore The IT Channel Company decided to open its own Young Professional Academy, where young people with little or no work experience are trained over a 6-month period to assist companies in switching to OneBizz support.
“During those six months they’re on our payroll and really learn everything from the ground up: selling, managing an implementation process, providing support to customers, marketing – the whole package. Once they’ve completed their training they can call themselves ‘cloud professionals’ and we can contract them out to channel partners who have trouble finding the right people,” Van Voorthuijsen explains.
Surprisingly, many of these whizz kids don’t actually come from IT backgrounds at all. As Van Voorthuijsen emphasises, it’s much more about the ability to communicate with customers and find solutions that meet their needs than about tech skills such as coding or building databases. This also explains the current rapid increase in the number of hard-to-fill vacancies in the IT sector, while many older IT professionals remain out of a job. “Our sector is basically faced with a major HR problem right now. There’s a lot of ‘old-school’ IT workers, who are used to working on a project basis according to fixed procedures, and too few people who can help customers streamline their operations using standard software as much as possible. That’s a totally different ballgame, really.”