Published on the 08/06/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Nicholas Birch appointed senior executive, New Zealand – and UXC says business is good…

The action continues in the Microsoft Dynamics space as UXC Eclipse brings on board a key executive from one of its recent acquisitions. Nicholas Birch, former joint MD of Koorb, has joined the Dynamics specialist within the UXC Group; UXC, of course, is now part of American tech giant CSC, and CSC itself is presently in merger discussions with HP Enterprise.

UXC Eclipse country manager Simon Kingston said Birch comes on in a role which will see him engaging at a high level with the company’s 200-odd clients as a right hand man. “Nick has a great deal of experience and is a trusted figure in the NZ market; bringing him on board provides a link with the past and he is very well connected, so we’d be silly not to take advantage of that, particularly for new business generation.”

Kingston said that three months into the role, Birch’s pedigree was already starting to pay dividends. He also said the scale of the consolidated CSC/UXC was proving a winner, with three major new deals secured in recent weeks.

Those deals haven’t yet been announced and Kingston said at least one of them is with a ‘media-shy company’ which is also a household name, and may be one of the biggest Dynamics AX deals ever done in this country. “These new customers are unlikely to have come on board without a partner of some magnitude; the market expectation is that when investing multiple millions into projects, you need someone robust with the project governance, depth and breadth to back it for the long haul.”

The pipeline’s looking good too, said Kingston, with yet another deal in the works which, should it close, will ‘dwarf’ all the others.

With at least one industry observer noting that the demise of Koorb and Birch’s subsequent appointment at one of the new giants of the industry perhaps does not bode well for the ‘little guy’ (‘get big or get out’ was the comment), does Kingston have a view on what room, if any, there is for the bit players?

“These new deals we’ve secured are all on Dynamics AX and, as I said in our recent discussion, that’s because AX is moving up a tier. There are still a lot of CRM players who are smaller; it is a question of right-sizing for the projects at hand. Dynamics Nav, too, has smaller partners capable of delivering for the mid-market – but these bigger AX deals would never go to a smaller partner,” he said.

While Flintfox, which recently took on Duncan Cox (formerly of Adaptable Solutions, which is today incorporated into UXC by way of Koorb) implied it is looking to mop up those clients left disillusioned by the flurry of M&A activity in the Dynamics market, Kingston is unperturbed.

“So much has been happening in the market and continues to happen with the potential CSC and HPE merger, but here in NZ, it is business as usual. [As a result of that activity] we have more to offer if that is of interest. We play to our strengths and scale, with the end-to end Microsoft stack and the wider offerings that CSC provides. For us, it is onwards and upwards.”