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Former Logicalis exec hired by ONI Plc to jump start services biz

Tom Kelly lands as non-exec director

Cisco Gold Partner Oni Plc has hired former Logicalis UK boss Tom Kelly to devise a strategy to squeeze more cash out of its bit barn investments by reworking the managed services and cloud practices.

Industry vet Kelly set up the local operation for Logicalis in 2003 and over the next decade grew the business into a £200m plus enterprise integrator and MSP. He has joined ONI as non-exec director.

“I want to take what the company already has and put in place a sales force that can take to market the data centre and maximise it by selling managed services to end customers,” he told us.

Across the land, tech suppliers are crossing the chasm into services as more customers consume IT as they would any utility. This presents multiple challenges to tech sellers from getting the right sales skills on board to reworking internal compensation mechanisms.

ONI, co-founded in 1992 by CEO Mark Collins and sales & marketing director Kevin Kivlochan, relies heavily on Cisco and was described by Kelly as “one of the super stars of unified comms”. He said more related “solutions” will be launched around February.

The company runs a Tier 3+ server farm in Luton with 240 racks (40 per cent capacity) from where it sells co-location, infrastructure-as-a-service, disaster recovery, UC and contact centre-as-a-service.

Customers range from the aerospace and defence industries, to building and construction, central & local government, education, legal, finance, and retail & distribution.

Turnover has grown from £11.95m in fiscal ’12 ended 31 March, to £14.6m in fiscal ’13, £15.79m in fiscal ’14 but fell to £14.4m in fiscal ’15.

It is perhaps this lack of progress in recent times that has prompted senior management to turn to Kelly, who has been in IT for 30 years.

In the timeframe, ONI made an operating loss of £747k in fiscal ’12, an operating profit of £1.06m in the next financial year, £1.17m the following year and £478k in the most recent period ended 30 March. ®

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