Advania’s interim year was a hiring window, not a holding pattern

Advania UK named Annette Murphy as its chief executive on 7 September. The release lists senior commercial and general management roles at Colt Technology Services, Lumen, Zayo/GEO and BT, and says her appointment “completes the transition from interim UK leadership” under Hege Støre, the group chief executive who, by IT Channel Oxygen’s account, had run the UK business as caretaker for most of 2026. Oxygen counts Murphy as the fourth person to hold the job inside a year: Geoff Kneen resigned in September 2025 after leading the business since 2022, James Hardy had what Oxygen calls a brief spell in charge, and then Støre took the UK job on an acting basis.

That is not a record any board would choose. Turnover at the top of a £471m business – the UK revenue figure for 2025, according to IT Channel Oxygen – usually produces a defensive crouch. Budgets freeze and recruiters are told to wait for the new boss.

Advania did something else. In April, with Støre still acting UK chief executive, it hired Sabrina Harris from BT as CFO and Tara Allison from Trend Micro into the newly created role of CMO. In May, Ian Goodfellow arrived from SHI as managing director of the value-added reseller (VAR) business, replacing an interim director. On 18 August the group launched Advania ALT, a sovereign AI platform, across its seven markets. The release says women now make up 50% of the UK senior leadership team; the company’s leadership page lists eight names, and four of them, including Murphy, arrived in 2026.

My argument is simple. An interim period is a hiring window, not a holding pattern, and boards that treat it as the latter waste the most useful months they will get. Advania rebuilt half its top table before the permanent boss walked in, and the boss it chose tells you where it thinks MSP margin is heading.

The gap is when hiring is easiest

The conventional objection is that a new chief executive wants to pick her own team. In practice she then spends her first year recruiting rather than running, and the business drifts while she does it. Candidates for the top job also say yes more readily when they can see who they will sit next to; a settled CFO and a filled sales seat are part of the offer.

The other objection is that a caretaker lacks the authority to make permanent hires. Støre is group chief executive of a business with about 5,000 employees, according to the release, backed by Goldman Sachs in Oxygen’s description. Hires she sponsors have the most durable backer in the company. Boards that put a placeholder in the chair get a placeholder’s results. Boards that put the shareholder’s representative in it can keep building.

The awkward part is why the gap existed at all. Oxygen reported in April that Advania UK had lost its CEO and its CFO, Andy Insley, the previous autumn, and Hardy’s tenure was measured in months. Three chief executive changes in a year is not a strategy. What Advania can claim is that its response was a hiring plan rather than a pause.

A telco CV says where margin is going

Advania UK is, on Oxygen’s figures, a reseller with a managed service business attached: 71% of its 2025 UK revenue came from hardware and software sales, 23% from managed services and 6% from professional services. The obvious hire for a Microsoft, Cisco and HPE partner with that mix is a lifer from a large VAR. Advania instead chose someone whose career was spent at carriers, where the business is owning a network, selling recurring capacity on it and managing utilization and cost per unit.

That choice fits what the group has been buying. In September 2025 it acquired Gompute, a high-performance computing and AI infrastructure platform, saying it could now deliver compute “in-region, on-demand and under full client control”. Advania ALT, launched in August, routes AI workloads between sovereign and frontier cloud models and hosts data with a local in-country entity, according to the launch release. Murphy’s own quote in her appointment release points the same way: “Advania ALT represents an important part of where the market is heading, particularly as organisations look for ways to use AI while keeping control of their data.”

These are the company’s claims about a platform that is a month old, and they should be read as such. But the direction is clear. A business that intends to operate AI infrastructure, rather than resell someone else’s, needs a boss who has run a utility-style asset: capacity planning, contract renewals, churn and cost to serve. That is a network operator’s toolkit, and Advania has decided it matters more than a career in license resale. For any MSP owner watching resale margin thin, the hire signals which skills the next stage of the market will pay for.

Channel boards should copy the sequence

First, name a caretaker with real authority. If the group chief executive or the chair cannot take the seat, the interim period will be spent waiting. Second, write the hiring plan for the gap before the search for the boss starts: which seats are open and which profiles fill them. Advania filled finance, marketing and the reseller business in that order and left the chief executive until last. Third, tell candidates for the top job what team they will get. It shortens the search and changes who applies.

Fourth, read the winning CV against your own revenue mix. If three-quarters of your income is resale and you want that to change, the person you hire should have run the kind of business you want to become, not the one you already are. Støre said the group is entering “a pivotal and transitional chapter”. Every MSP is. The empty chair at the top is the best excuse a board will ever get to fill the chairs around it.