Camb IT

Many MSPs continue to navigate the changes that Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience has brought. We caught up with Rob Corder, Managing Director of Camb IT, to get their take on it, and how they feel their migrations are going with support from Giacom. View Camb IT website

Camb IT Support is a Managed Service Provider (MSP) and IT support business based in Cambridge. Founded in 2004, we initially provided IT support to local businesses, but since then have grown to become a larger team offering a range of solutions, as well as servicing much larger scale customers.

We now offer a variety of cloud services (mostly through Cloud Market), from Microsoft 365 to Managed Security to hosted VoIP, and have 150 contracted customers. This includes businesses of all sizes across a range of different sectors, from charities to professional services. We have been a Giacom customer since 2015 – time flies!

If I’m honest, we had considerable concerns. No business likes to spring price increases on their customers – still less when they are forced on them by a supplier. I recognise Microsoft hadn’t increased the price of M365 products since launch, but this was a point we were having to make on Microsoft’s behalf to our customers. Also, the structure of the price increase was relatively complex, and it took time for us to understand the changes, then relay this to customers and adjust our billing systems.

We had great support from Giacom in the build-up to NCE and beyond. They alerted us to the initial NCE announcement, and kept us up to date when Microsoft released further information.

We’ve also made extensive use of the other helpful NCE resources provided by Giacom. We exchanged several emails and had a few Teams meetings with our Account Managers, who helped us further understand how NCE would affect our business.

Currently we are in the process of implementing a phased NCE migration, depending on when existing terms end. We’ll be glad when the migration process is complete!

The Cloud Market portal is in general very easy to use and has made migrating our legacy licences very easy. For example, at a quick glance we can easily view either NCE and legacy licenses alongside their term renewal dates.

Special mentions must go to Anthony Heptonstall, who was our Account Manager when NCE was first announced, and Sophie Dimelow who took over our account a few months ago. Both have been unfailingly patient and responsive when we have raised queries. Sophie continues to check-in to make sure that our NCE migration is going smoothly and offer assistance where we need it.

Both our Account Managers made efforts to understand our business, which allowed them to provide assistance or recommend products where they felt there was a genuine need.

Giacom’s Microsoft Secure solutions haven even helped us to improve our margins on some Microsoft 365 products.

Our team have benefitted from the technology training workshops organised by Giacom, such as the Microsoft Partner Incentives and Microsoft Partner Network programme webinars. This has been invaluable in keeping us up to date and to understand processes.

Giacom’s Cloud Market is a direct benefit to our customer, as it allows us to be very responsive in terms of provisioning, de-provisioning and adjusting licences. Not all of our cloud services are provisioned through Giacom, but if a product is offered through Giacom it is automatically ‘pre-qualified’ as far as we are concerned. They have helped us to offer the best-in-breed cloud solutions to our customers.

I would have no hesitation in recommending Giacom to other MSPs. We are very satisfied customers of seven years and counting. Without wanting to overstate things, Giacom are pretty much the perfect CSP. There’s no hard sell, support is great, and the range of products is excellent. Also the systems are very good and account management is the best we’ve received from any other supplier.

We genuinely look upon Giacom as a resource, as well as a supplier. They have a deep understanding of the MSP market, and tailor their products and support to businesses like ours accordingly. It’s pretty unusual for a supplier of a particular family of solutions to provide such a valuable range of ancillary services free of charge.

In the next year, we’re planning to develop our business and Giacom will definitely play a role in this. They are certainly one of our most valued suppliers.