Josh Evans leads UK&I channel development at GCX Managed Services, a provider of managed network and security services for global enterprises, including SASE, SSE and managed SD-WAN, plus cybersecurity solutions, cloud-hosted unified communications and NOC and SOC outsourcing. GCX is aiming to build dedicated channel expertise in each major sales region, supported by enhanced partner pricing and quoting capabilities, AI-powered tools and extensive onboarding, training and support resources. What have been your business highlights of the last 12 months? I’ve had the pleasure of building our UK channel partner base from scratch at GCX. This has been both a challenging and exciting venture. Onboarding our first UK channel partner and securing our first UK channel order has been my biggest highlight of the year. What is currently having the greatest impact on your business? The channel. GCX has had a channel business for years but hadn’t really capitalised on it until the recent successes of my colleagues in Italy. Since then, the business has doubled down on our channel programme and invested in people and processes. As a company that’s looking to drive growth, nothing can compete with the power of strong partnerships, and we’re already delivering measurable results. What recent business win are you most proud of? Last month we won the circuits for all the dealerships in Berlin for a major car brand via the channel. As much as it’s great to be working with a big brand, the best part of the deal was how it demonstrated the key pillars of our channel business. We leveraged one of our in-country partnerships to provide a solution in less than a day, worked with the partner to develop a winning price, and have already built a delivery team around the project to ensure the circuits are delivered smoothly. Where do you see the next big opportunity for your channel partners? As SD-WAN and SASE grow, and infrastructure around the world improves, customers don’t need to be able to deliver complicated global MPLS deployments anymore, making the market more accessible to companies without international resources. Now all you need is a strong customer relationship and the right global partner to unlock access to the international connectivity market. Did you get into IT/comms by accident or by design? My degree was in Maths, so I’d always expected to work in accounting or finance. Falling into IT came as a result of my placement year at NetApp, where I managed marketing budgets. I spent a lot of my time working with the channel there, and I came to love interacting with partners and working towards a common goal with them. The decision to turn my back on Maths and throw myself into the IT channel felt completely natural in the end. If you could swap your current job for any other, what would it be? I’m happy with where I am right now, but if money were no object, I’d be working at a white-water centre somewhere as a rafting guide. I spent a summer working at the centre in Lee Valley, manning the banks of the river and saving people who’d fallen into the water. It was the most fun I’ve ever had at work, and I was the fittest I’ve ever been in my life. Which business leader do you most admire and why? I’ve started to see a lot of content from the Vice Chair of an ad agency in the UK called Rory Sutherland. His position and the sector he works in don’t particularly interest me, but his ability to think entirely out of the box and flip traditional business scenarios on their head is amazing to me. The thing that really resonates is that we approach so many problems with logic, but the world and the people in it aren’t very logical. I think there’s a place somewhere between logic and madness where all the best ideas live. What’s the best piece of business advice you’ve been given? A piece of work that’s completed is 100 times better than a piece of work that’s perfect but never delivered. It’s easy to get wrapped up in perfection, but getting Josh Evans, UKI Channel Manager, GCX Managed Services 60 seconds with… 60 seconds Josh Evans 24 01732 759725
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