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Achievements and challenges
A personal and professional journey
As Scott has steered the business in its new direction, he’s relished the freedom to create unique customer solutions in ways that simply aren’t possible on the vendor side.
“With a partner like Ultima, you have the ability to do lots of unique new things with technology. You can bring the best bits together across a bunch of different technologies and make it work for customers. That’s the really exciting thing – the complexity of bringing it all together for a customer and making it work, making it resilient, and then managing their environment so they don’t have to.”
Goals realised
On an individual level, Scott wanted to prove to himself he was equal to the task of evolving and growing a channel business. He now fully appreciates the complexities of running a highly technical and multifaceted company, at a time when the pace of change in both markets and technologies seems to be endlessly accelerating.
“I never regret joining Ultima, though the process of evolving the business has taken longer than I anticipated. The sheer amount of change involved in transforming us into modern and resilient cloud services company is immense.
Businesses like ours are complex to run, and the industry moves ridiculously fast. So trying to keep up with external changes while transforming a company is a real challenge. But I’m confident it’s a challenge we’ve risen to.”
Navigating adversity
Scott cites Covid as the single biggest challenge he’s experienced as a business leader. The pandemic and its successive lockdowns created deep uncertainty for Ultima and its customers. For a managed services business, there was the real possibility of no-one being available to manage or support Ultima’s customers’ systems – the ultimate worst-case scenario.
But Ultima was already geared up for remote working, and the team voluntarily went above and beyond the call of duty in maintaining continuity of services for their customers.
As a result, the business continued to fulfil its SLAs, and was able to pull through a period of disruption without losing any people. This was despite Ultima having customers in industries like hospitality that were heavily affected by Covid.
“Covid was such a jarring experience. Getting through that 12-to-18-month hiatus was a huge challenge. But throughout my time at Ultima, the way we stepped up for our customers and rose to the challenge of Covid is the single thing I’m most proud of.”