I just returned from a mid year event. The event this year was different than previous years in that only leadership and some technical resources attended. Fear uncertainty and doubt was the mood. A couple VP’s have recently retired. From conversations at the midyear, more leaders are expecting to leave in the near future.
We have recently been acquired by a private equity firm. Private equity firms rarely sink money into organizations that are doing great. They are looking to quickly improve the value of their investment, often by making radical changes.
While no one publicly talked about it, the Softchoice track record is not good. Last year we were around 30% of plan for services. This year, we realized that we could not hit the aggressive growth that we wanted without redefining the term. Now we are counting software titles that happen to be deployed via a web browser as a service, thereby increasing our services revenue. As a result of the new definition, we are around 80% of our services plan. ESSN revenue (storage servers and networking) has declined by about 20% over last year while that segment of the market is growing at our competitors.
That is why the consensus is that the senior leadership at Softchoice does not have the ability to take us to the next level and that the new investors will recognize that soon if they do not already. Of course, the public comments were all what they thought that we wanted to hear , which was that the senior leadership was on board for the next 5 years. In my opinion, that would be a disaster.
