Curvature CEO On Helping Aggressive Partners, Interest Among 'Disruptive' Vendors And Future Of White Box

An Independent Juggernaut Emerges

Six months since completing a pivotal merger in January with fellow infrastructure solution provider Systems Maintenance Services (SMS), third-party maintenance powerhouse Curvature sees itself as a potential go-to partner for aggressive channel players and forward-thinking vendors looking to disrupt the market.

Known as SMS | Curvature prior to a global rebranding it revealed Monday, Curvature – No. 85 on the CRN Solution Provider 500 – has emerged in 2017 as a $550 million heavyweight that provides support services, hardware replacement and data center lifecycle management - all within one contract. The Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company also boasts a broad global footprint, with more than 2,200 employees, 15,000 strategic partnerships and a support network that features over 100 staffed service centers.

As Curvature seeks to build on its momentum under the new brand, CEO John Wozniak discussed his company's unique position in the market - underscored by its diverse portfolio of offerings - and where he sees the IT industry trending for vendors and solution providers.

Click through to read an edited excerpt from Wozniak's conversation with CRN.

How will your channel strategy evolve following the merger?

Our legacy go-to-market has always been with the channel. That's a great path to grow. Some obvious geographic dynamics in Europe make the channel incredibly attractive to work through. We've been a pretty substantive partner to U.S.-based channel organizations, as well. We're aiding a solution that they're looking to provide to their clients when they don't have all the resources to do it. The newly combined organization represents a lowering of the trade barriers, where we'll look to leverage our existing supply chain, our existing solutions architects and our existing delivery organization for the benefit of clients to and through the channel as well. We'll have some legacy channel executives spend time in each of the international theaters and look to develop an offering that's much more user-friendly.

How would Curvature's offerings benefit a prospective channel partner?

For VARs or anybody else in the channel, their success is going to be dependent upon the breadth of their portfolio and their speed at incubating a new offering. From a delivery capability and a solutioning standpoint, there is no other independent organization they can go to and suddenly be able to offer a complete set of life cycle services in most locations around the world. It all depends on how strategic and how aggressive the channel players want to be. For those that are really looking to be aggressive in the market and expand their reach and expand their value proposition to their client, I'm not sure of another organization that could help them more.

You mentioned offering a "complete set of life cycle services." Can you explain some of Curvature's differentiators there?

We start with the solutioning, through the provisioning, continuing through the life of the asset inside of the environment and, of course, through the end of its life, with a responsible disposition process inclusive of following all the necessary in-country environmental standards. And there's government standards associated with security. That's an incredibly complete value proposition to any organization looking for a solution that in many regards is how they want to consume IT, most synonymous with the public cloud. The public cloud, you don't have to do that much in terms of IT management. If you look at what our organization looks to offload from a CEO or CIO, it's having to worry about your infrastructure.

Why would a customer opt for that over simply purchasing infrastructure from a vendor?

The experience they're receiving from their existing vendor is inadequate or insufficient. It's an incomplete offering, meaning that they're going to consume something and the support of that device ends at a certain point in time. But it still has a long, useful life ahead of it. There's nobody there helping them along. A tremendous amount of capital expenditure has been deployed. Anybody that's going to be a responsible financial fiduciary to their shareholders is going to realize there's a long tail on what they build, and they want to extract the most value out of it. That includes consuming secondary hardware as it is consuming services that support devices on into their extended lives.

Right now, you say 55 percent of the business is maintenance and services. How do you distinguish yourselves from a managed services provider?

We've intentionally built it bottom-up. There's the benefit of having dedicated field engineering, central engineering and a services desk built. Our platform can deliver support across any one of those offerings, coming into our service desk or delivered out through our field. How much of the delivery incident do you control? That's what we always built the business to do. We wanted complete control. Our original value prop to the customer was: We understand you're getting a level of service that's below what you're paying for. We're going to focus exclusively on delivering service and that's the only thing our engineer's going to do. By giving you a focused delivery arm, you're going to therefore receive an uplifted experience.

What sort of interest are you generating from vendors? And what sorts of vendors are you hoping to add to your partnership roster?

The importance and relevance of a delivery platform that is malleable and agile and available 24/7 continues to increase. We're seeing a lot of inbound interest from vendors. Any disruptive or niche vendor coming to market today should be working with us if you want an immediate path to market. You have over 450 sales professionals working with clients that have our trust for more than three decades. You have a dedicated delivery organization that we can deploy physically to support it for its life. Those disruptive vendors have a turnkey OEM offering in the market. The organizations ahead of it are mostly international. You're going to see a lot of disruption come out of Asia, where hardware vendors look to take a big bite out of the market share. I'd like to see any of them really step up to the challenge.

How much of your revenue comes from direct sales compared to indirect, and where has that ratio been trending?

More than a quarter of the [data center] business is indirect, and that has continued to increase. If you look at the combined business, you're probably approaching 40 percent of the business being indirect. We're working with manufacturers and vendors or we're working with a VAR or a systems integrator or an ITO. That business line has continued to grow. They're looking toward extended offerings and increased cost savings to their end users that make them competitive. If you went back 10 years, that number would've been much closer to zero than the 40 percent it is today. Disproportionate growth over the last decade.

Where would you expect your indirect sales to be a few years from now?

We can be as beneficial to our clients, indirect or direct, as they are willing to be innovative. It is possible for large vendors to aggressively pursue new markets, which would dramatically shift our numbers. I could say 80 percent of our revenue could be indirect. It could be as wide as 40-80 percent. But that's less incumbent upon me and more incumbent upon vendors deciding that they want to be a leader in the space. I know that sounds silly or obnoxious, but it's true. We consistently see vendors that have a chance to be the new market leader step on themselves as they're going to market. I expect there to be a major disruption amongst the vendor community as there's a significant shift to white box.

How is Curvature able to support clients looking for white box offerings?

It's all in how you get to the end users. The largest ones have already figured it out. We support a lot of white box environments on behalf of the end users. Most have already done that. The [Open Compute Project, which shares designs of data center products among companies,] is trying to identify how we make it available to the masses. That's where any of those white-box manufacturers like ours need to have a little joint go-to-market. If a client is looking for a white label offering, they want to define, spec and build their own hardware, and they're looking for someone to do that with them, including the provisioning, the deployment and the support. We're the only organization that can do that on a turnkey basis today. We could have them locked and loaded in days.

How would you address solution providers who might see Curvature as competition?

No question, a lot of times we're viewed as a competitor in the channel. That's most likely the result of having more than 10,000 customers that are contracting us and knowing us. It's probably not an easy thing to get away from – we're in business just like an OEM is, to support all parties that find our services relevant.