Applicable does the Microsoft work nobody puts in the launch video

A corporate breakup has a surprisingly domestic problem: who gets the shared folders? For one global financial services organisation with 60,000 employees, separating a business unit meant dividing a central Microsoft 365 environment into three independent tenants. Applicable, the Bristol-based cloud specialist, took on the move. The assignment covered mailboxes, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Power Platform assets. A deal announced upstairs had become a rather large moving day downstairs.

Applicable describes a programme of discovery, tailored security designs, phased migration and out-of-hours cutovers, followed by intensive support. Its account says the project finished on time and within budget, with minimal disruption. The central problem was a shared environment that constrained the businesses’ independence. The result was three platforms their respective divisions could govern for themselves.

That job is a useful introduction to Applicable. It works on the parts of Microsoft’s cloud that employees notice mainly when something goes wrong: access, communications, administration and continuity. Its customers need the office to keep functioning while the organisation around it changes shape.

The office moved. The maintenance stayed.

Applicable’s history begins with hosted Domino, Exchange and specialist web services for corporate customers. Its legal entity was incorporated in August 1997 as Positive Management Solutions Limited. It briefly became Applicable Solutions Limited in 2000 before adopting its current name that May. Even its paperwork has had a migration.

The company dates its move into unified communications to 2010, starting with Microsoft Lync and progressing through Skype to Teams. That background matters. Enterprise communications involves the connection between applications, voice services and the people trying to reach one another. A collaboration tool can be easy to open and complicated to operate across a large organisation.

In 2016, Arkadin, part of the NTT group, acquired Applicable. The acquisition materials described 330,000 application users and a service infrastructure spanning the US, Europe and Asia. Those figures belong to that period. The appeal was a combination of private-cloud communications expertise, voice integration and round-the-clock service management for large enterprises.

Applicable’s own timeline records another turn in 2024: a management buyout, accompanied by an expansion across Microsoft’s cloud portfolio. Its current leadership page names John Scanlon, Mark Wells and Liz Jackson as co-owners, responsible for technical operations, strategy, and finance and HR respectively. The present business covers a wider territory than the hosted-email operation that started the story.

Buying the licence leaves plenty to do

Today, Applicable’s offering has two connected parts. Consultancy helps an organisation decide what to change and carry it out. Managed services handle continuing administration and support. The commercial model combines individually scoped projects with ongoing services selected around the customer’s deployment. It is a business-to-business service relationship rather than a consumer app with a checkout button.

The distinction matters to a buyer. A migration has a destination and a delivery plan. A working cloud environment keeps generating requests after everyone has declared the project finished. People join, change roles and leave. Teams need support. Configurations need attention. Applicable’s proposition is that a customer can use the same specialist business across those stages.

Its consultancy catalogue stretches from Teams Phone integration to Azure migration, infrastructure optimisation and disaster recovery planning. Security work involves Microsoft Entra, Defender and Intune; data governance includes Purview. Copilot readiness sits alongside these services. The common thread is expertise in how Microsoft products are deployed together inside an organisation, including the awkward connections to existing systems.

Customers range from midsize UK organisations to global enterprises. The website names sectors including healthcare, manufacturing, utilities, professional services and finance. It also displays Microsoft, BT, Fujitsu and AudioCodes in its partner group. Its route to market includes both direct customer relationships and work through partners, a useful distinction when the specialist doing the engineering sits behind another supplier’s contract.

“Our services are modular”

Applicable’s description of its managed services

The bill has more than one moving part

Applicable quotes consultancy according to scope and says it shapes the delivery plan around the customer’s budget. Its free half-day advisory programme provides a smaller starting point, with sessions on subjects such as identity, information protection, cloud telephony and Copilot. A buyer can begin with a particular problem rather than commissioning a wholesale technology overhaul.

For ongoing operations, the company promotes automation and coordinated workflows as ways to reduce repetitive administration. Its homepage advertises reductions of up to 80 percent in the effort and cost of managing Microsoft environments, alongside possible additional licensing savings of 15 to 20 percent. These are company marketing claims, not a forecast for every deployment.

The two percentages should stay in separate columns. Less time spent administering users is different from a smaller Microsoft licence invoice. A sensible buying exercise would establish both starting points, identify what work is covered, and compare the improvement with the service fee. That is an editorial reading of the proposition, and a more useful test than adding the percentages together.

In February 2026, Applicable published guidance on Microsoft’s pricing and packaging changes, making licence discovery and usage analysis part of its response. Its proposed work includes finding underused licences and mismatches between job requirements and subscriptions. That provides a concrete reason to revisit an existing deployment: a renewal is an opportunity to examine the shopping basket.

Copilot meets the untidy cupboard

Applicable’s AI pitch starts with the state of the organisation’s information. Its September 2025 article, “Govern Before You Copilot,” argues that access permissions, obsolete content and uncontrolled sharing can undermine a rollout. The concern is straightforward: making information easier to retrieve puts more pressure on the decisions about who should retrieve it.

This is an extension of its administrative specialism. The company’s readiness assessment examines identity, licensing, information protection and data hygiene before drawing up an adoption roadmap. For an IT leader, the practical attraction is having someone connect the AI purchase to the existing security and information-management work.

In March 2026, its attention extended to AI agents, with an article about governing their identities, permissions and activity. That publication is evidence of where Applicable is taking its advisory conversation. Its established subject remains recognisable: as another kind of actor enters the workplace, somebody must decide what it can access and who is responsible for it.

The useful answer is sometimes “alongside”

Applicable explicitly says customers still need their own IT staff. Its managed services are intended to extend that team, with administration, specialist support and incident management available around the clock. This is one of the more revealing details in the sales material. Outsourcing some of the work does not remove the customer’s responsibility for knowing what the business needs.

That also helps locate the company in the market. A buyer could use another Microsoft specialist, a larger systems integrator or its own operations team. Applicable’s case rests on its combination of communications experience, Microsoft focus, project delivery and ongoing support. Those are assessable capabilities; a promise to transform everything would be harder to buy intelligently.

The fit is strongest where Microsoft services are central to daily work and the internal team needs extra capacity or specialist knowledge. A company with little Microsoft infrastructure has less reason to choose this particular catalogue. Likewise, automation needs agreed processes to automate. If nobody owns the access policy or the data, faster administration cannot settle the underlying decision.

There is a repeatable lesson in the separation project: understand dependencies before changing the environment, stage the work, and plan support for the people arriving on the other side. The sequence is worth copying. Its outcome will still depend on the customer’s complexity, preparation and willingness to make decisions.

Someone brought a paintbrush

The company’s public personality is less formal than its service catalogue. Its About page describes volunteering days spent decorating, working at a Scout campsite and supporting community organisations. Fundraising has included Movember and diabetes awareness. These are small details, but they put actual activities behind the familiar corporate language about values.

There is similar candour on the team page: strategic director Mark Wells keeps Highland cows, while technical director John Scanlon enjoys fell walking and board games. Neither hobby makes a migration safer. Both make a welcome change from the interchangeable executive portrait accompanied by a paragraph about passion.

For customers, the consequential version of that personality is ownership. Somebody has to carry a problem from discovery through resolution, including the inconvenient hours. Applicable sells that responsibility in a Microsoft setting. The work may end in three independent tenants, a better-run phone service or fewer repetitive requests. Employees get on with their day. That is a perfectly respectable outcome for enterprise technology.