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‘Alive with technology – creating
cloud culture the Six Degrees way’
From a MSP startup in 2011 to a £100m converged technology infrastructure provider in just five years,
Six Degrees Group (6DG) has seen the cloud and managed services markets leap to prominence.
Led by founder and CEO Alastair Mills, the
company’s vision was to provide the capabilities
offered by a true data centre and converged
network operator but with the flexibility and
service-creation skills of an agile startup.
Now, celebrating its fifth birthday, 6DG
has passed the £100m revenue milestone,
established a 2000 strong mid-market customer
base and welcomed employee number 500. The
pace of change and innovation has been rapid
throughout those five years and continues to
challenge the traditional role of IT. For Mills and
his team, the message has moved way beyond
‘why cloud?’ to helping customers embrace it as
a fundamental part of their culture.
‘A year ago, we were talking about the
development of “cloud people”, where we
were seeing clients increasingly shape their IT
teams with cloud front of mind,’ explains Mills.
‘At the time, that was an emerging concept,
yet just a year later we are seeing the growth
of a broader “cloud culture”, whose influence
is going far beyond tech teams and right into
the boardroom.’
Cloud focus is on business value
Cloud is driving a change in how organisations
want their IT to work with the rest of the
business. The idea that IT has a genuine
understanding of issues outside of its direct remit
has been on the agenda of many businesses for
years. The problem has been that traditional IT
meant technical staff needed to spend their time
‘keeping the lights on’, and the scope to achieve
greater levels of integration has been limited.
But now, many business leaders are asking their
IT teams to take on a broader role helping the
business to grow.
This fundamental shift in the role of IT
has been enabled and driven by the arrival of
cloud technology and the growing experience
of providers, such as 6DG. It also presents a
continuing challenge - many people working
in and around the cloud industry do so with
the ‘preconception’, 6DG argues, that cloud
adoption is being driven by the desire to save
costs, and that the arrival of cloud is driving a
reduction in internal IT staff.
‘Both our experience and ongoing research
show that neither of these ideas are true,’ says
Mills. ‘Cloud adoption is focused on delivering
business value, not cutting costs and staff.
What is correct, however, is that the momentum
behind cloud computing is growing and it is
becoming an integral part of IT delivery for
many businesses.’
6DG’s own recent research, conducted by
Freeform Dynamics, revealed that the underlying
momentum behind cloud is extremely strong.
Ninety-six per cent of IT professionals with 50
to 2,500 employees have some involvement
with the cloud. One fifth reported ‘extensive’
use of cloud and 52 per cent described it as
‘significant’. Just under a quarter (24 per cent)
said their involvement with cloud was ‘modest’.
Yet, only 15 per cent of respondents
cited cost saving as their primary factor for
implementing cloud solutions. Almost a third (31
per cent) said cost management was important
but only when combined with delivering more
value to the business, while almost a quarter
were concerned mainly with value.
Cloud has helped businesses address
a general shift in emphasis in traditional
IT teams who, as one customer put it,
‘don’t have the manpower to babysit
hardware anymore’. These organisations