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SCC: the hosted voice market? Yep, we've got plans for that

Fresh from Fluidata investment, CEO Rigby outlines next priorities

Building more bit barn capacity, and beefing up security and hosted voice services - potentially via acquisition - are the next moves that SCC CEO James Rigby is plotting from his Birmingham-based war room.

The Midlands tech dynasty this week bought a “significant minority stake” in connectivity firm Fluidata to act as the “glue” between its data centres - something it hinted last year was on the horizon.

The buy adds £17m in revenues to its base - Fluidata sells Layer 2 and Layer 3 connectivity and hosting via a network of 17 carriers and 12 DCs - SCC’s two data centres will be added to that list.

SCC has one server farm in Birmingham that is 80 per cent full, and one in Fareham, acquired from SSE Telecom last autumn (with room for up to 500 more racks) - the total capacity is currently 1,700 racks.

“We have some strength in the data centre and the distributed area - the desktop - but this [deal with Fluidata] is the glue, the connectivity and the network. It was the next logical place for us to go,” he told El Chan.

Fewer mid-market enterprises will run their tech infrastructure on site meaning that connectivity become more and more important, the exec said - and SCC no longer needs to resell other companies IP.

Rigby refused to be drawn on the details of the Fluidata stake - either to be specific about the price or the exact shareholding. But he said, “our preference is always to eventually take outright ownership”.

He said managed security services is something it already offers but it could be “open to looking at security boutiques”, and “we’ll get more DC capacity and maybe the voice market is an area to go [into]”.

“Customers are moving from legacy on-premise PBXs to a hosted service in a data centre. This is a big opportunity for us and is a risk for legacy providers. Solutions like Lync could sit well in our operation so voice could be next”.

SCC sold its distribution business SDG to Tech Data in 2012 for the handsome sum of $350m, which at the time equated to £220m.

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