Digital Space has completed a period of refinement, says CTO/ COO Richard Beeston, with the MSP consolidating its focus on mid-market customers and shedding legacy products and business units to boost efficiencies and create a more agile, future-fit organisation.
In the last five years, Digital Space has undergone a significant transition from an ISP to an MSP, tightening its focus on larger business customers with over 100 employees in more than 10 locations. “We have moved away from other markets and reduced the solutions we sell and the vendors we work with,” said Beeston.
Digital Space’s focused portfolio includes managed and professional services across networking, connectivity, UC, security and hybrid cloud. “This is reflective of us seeing our core proposition as having deep technical knowledge in a reduced technology set that is relevant to a particular segment of the market. This segment enables us to focus on recurring revenues by providing high-quality services on complex technical environments.”
Whilst refinement may suggest shrinking or scaling down, the strategy of targeting higher growth areas with a more deliberate portfolio has enabled Digital Space to add to its scale during this period with its annual turnover rising from £55m for the financial year ending December 2019, to £62m in its latest accounts, growing incrementally every year.
According to Beeston, the highest growth area in recent years has been managed services around SD-WAN and SD-Branch, matching an overall growth trend in the market, with several analyst firms including MarketsandMarkets and Grand View Research predicting 20+ per cent CAGR till 2030.
Much of this growth is driven by digital transformation and cloud migration as businesses move away from data centres thus requiring flexible WANs for cloud access. This has led to significant client wins, including a nationwide hospitality customer, from which Digital Space won an SD-WAN agreement to cover over 850 sites.
At this juncture, Digital Space is entering its next phase, which will continue the process of refinement. “To ensure growth continues over the next five years, we are revising our multi-year strategy; however, this is not a revolution, but more of an evolution,” he said. “Into 2026, we are undertaking a lot of transformation activity, and to do so, we have reviewed our entire business over the last year. This review has identified products and parts of the business that are no longer core for us.
“Through this process, we have focused ourselves on more solution-oriented markets and conducted significant research into high-value markets and spent more time developing our propositions for security and AI. These are resonating well with our existing customers and new business prospects,” he added.
“We have moved away from talking about us, and product and tech to talking about how we solve problems for customers. This is further refined by vertical. We now express this in our messaging and website so we can be more relatable to customers and display how we can solve their problems, turning our marketing function into a revenue-generating business unit, often leading in turn to cross portfolio selling rather than point product.”
Digital Space has also engaged in a process to ensure its internal systems do not creak under the weight change, swapping many core systems including ITSM, finance and billing as well as modernising its data architecture. “We believe this sets us up for growth in the coming years with systems that can support us,” said Richard. “This programme is designed to ensure we use the systems we have to the maximum and that they all talk to each other. Thus, removing wasteful swivel chair processes, data errors and data inconsistencies.”
Beeston noted that data is becoming a critical lever for Digital Space, both internally to track key metrics but also externally to help it convey ROI to its customers. “We have become much more data-focused and rigorous with our business, particularly in sales and marketing,” he said. “This is supported by a whole refresh of our data platform and reporting system. Data has become immeasurably more important to us.” This is a tighter requirement following Digital Space’s move from ISP to MSP.
For the next five years, Beeston expects to experience organic growth in our core business. “However, we must also be mindful of new areas of the market,” he added. “AI is obviously on the agenda for a lot of businesses, and it is our place as a managed service provider to help organisations understand how to use it best for them. We also believe we will see further growth in our security services and data protection portfolio.”
With a strategy based on continual review and reinvention that is enabling Digital Space to cut away inefficiencies and move away from non-optimal markets, Beeston is confident that it can adapt to the agility of the market without losing sight of its goals.
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