Now in its eighth trading year, Latitude UK was founded with a small amount of seed capital to provide IT products and services to distribution and resellers.  Latitude’s early success was in the network market with Cisco products.  The company has continued to make careful choices about the vendors with which they partner, preferring to work with best of breed brands including Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu Siemens as an enterprise partner for their Prime Power range.

“One of the inevitabilities about selling hardware, “ says Jago “is that with each new generation, specifications will increase while prices will drop, gradually putting a squeeze on margins.  We’d realised two or three years ago that as time progressed we were going to be working much harder and selling much more just in order to stand still.  Not only that, but because we are a business which believes in the value of service and because service has played an essential part in developing a loyal customer base, it was going to get harder to look after our customers in a way which fitted with our founding ethos.  So we were on the look out for a big opportunity.”

In 2003 Latitude got involved with APC.  “Our current situation has a lot to do with our APC account manager, James Rigby.  He went through the cooling presentation, carefully highlighting the situation being experienced by datacentre managers, and it was just like a light coming on in my head,” continues Jago.  “I am not exaggerating when I say that I just couldn’t sleep that night, and by the following morning I had decided to change my business completely in order to take advantage of the opportunity which I was convinced existed.”

“I became fascinated by the idea of corporate IT investment going up in smoke!  And I could immediately see how APC’s value proposition for InfraStruXure is relevant to any and every business which has a datacentre – irrespective of the industry vertical in which we categorise them.  As far as I could see, APC and InfraStruXure had real long term potential for the development of Latitude UK.”

Having made that momentous decision, Jago immediately set about ringing the changes.  Firstly the company’s website was redesigned and new content created to reflect Latitude’s new value proposition.  Secondly, the company set about acquiring the new skillsets required to generate and fulfil the new opportunity.  “The website was pretty straightforward and within a four to six-week period we had posted new material which much better reflected the sort of business we had ambition to become.”

“The acquisition of new skillsets has, however, been a much harder road.  I estimate it took up to 18 months to get right; every member of staff has been sent on APC training because everyone that picks up a phone at Latitude has to sound competent and be able to have a sensible conversation about datacentre issues.  Throughout this period, my confidence in APC and the InfraStruXure solution has never waned.  At the same time, APC’s apparent enthusiasm and interest in our business has been overwhelming – I’ve never known a manufacturer like them and I think that many vendors could take a leaf out of their book.”

“It’s all about people – APC seem to have assembled an intelligent and committed team.  For example, where we felt that James Rigby leaving APC may have affected us adversely, Eben Owen has stepped up to the plate and has beguiled us with his ability to entertain both engineering and commercial issues.  His use of analogies to explain the complexities of power and cooling to non-technical audiences has greatly increased our capability and credibility in sales situations.”

With the new website in place and knowledge being increased, the company has also changed its methodology.  Nick Jago elaborates:  “Every vendor, partner and reseller will call up the IT manager and try and have a conversation about new IT products.  But in the end, servers are servers and they have no transformational effect on an organisation.  When we call the companies to talk about the very real problems they are experiencing in the datacentre, we find a refreshing willingness to share their concerns and needs.  Business has changed; graceful shutdown is a thing of the past and these days companies just want to talk about high availability.”

“It doesn’t eliminate hard work though,” says Eddie Partridge, Latitude’s recently appointed business development manager and a veteran of IT.  “We continue to buy in data, qualify it and cold call it – all we want to know is whether the organisation has any plans to change the use and requirement of their existing datacentre.  After that, there’s still no magic just hard work; making follow-up calls, getting appointments, presenting, creating opportunities to talk about InfraStruXure and never taking ‘no’ to be the final answer.”

“Our view is that the cooling issue is almost unique in its ability to create a dialogue between IT and facilities – even if it a heated discussion!  In this scenario, we see our role as honest brokers or even marriage guidance counsellors, helping both parties communicate with each other and understand the other’s requirements.”

“Based on our first experiences of running seminars with APC during 2005, we intend to build our engagement strategy for 2006 around a series of Technology Days to be hosted at the new demo facility at Green Park,” Partridge continues.  “We’re surprised at how receptive potential users are to this approach and intend to invest every penny of the marketing development fund we attract into this programme.  Part of our strategy includes using a telemarketing company who have worked on APC campaigns in the past to ensure all personnel who influence the buying decision attend these events.”

“The Technology Days represent an ideal opportunity to qualify the strength of interest in InfraStruXure and help us to build on our £2.4m pipeline.  Not surprisingly, we’re finding that most of the interest is for 40 – 80kVA solutions, but we’re also getting traction with blue chip companies as they begin to recognise that the cost of downtime can easily outweigh the cost of an InfraStruXure solution.  The downside is that a sale can take up to 18 months to finalise, but we’ve noted an increase in our run rate business since the end of Q3 this year and we have a two large deals which we are expecting in the first part of 2006.”

Nick Jago takes up the story “I’m highly optimistic for 2006.  I’m completely sold on APC and InfraStruXure – as far as I’m concerned the only other companies in the arena can’t compete as they only have experience cooling people and are no match for APC with their domain expertise cooling IT equipment.  What’s more, we find that APC is a company like ours, with a burning hunger to learn and to do things better.  We have access to APC senior personnel such as Paul Bron in order to put our ideas across.  Because of dialogues like this we can be confident that APC will continue to work hard on product and service provision, because it keeps APC close enough to the market to know its real needs.”

For further information, please contact:

Nick Jago or Eddie Partridge for Latitude UK on 01793 421800