continued... technologyreseller.co.uk 27 CYBERSECURITY team. Those are all bridging roles between other teams both in and out of Distology. We’re setting out to be a disruptive company that's diverse and inviting to anyone, however they need to work. Running an ‘IT service’ as opposed to an ‘IT department’ might sound nuanced, but IT departments are often traditional – you have an IT Manager who does what's in front of them and does what they're asked to do by the IT Director. An IT service is all about helping people to work more effectively. Chris, our IT service lead, spends as much time talking to people about what they need and how he can help them to do their job better as he does on more traditional IT management roles. It’s the same with solutions engineering. They work into our technology vendors to help them to understand what we can do; they work into our internal team to help them to learn about the technology; they're training the channel; and they’re also jumping onto calls with partners’ end customers. The alliances function is very similar. Our lead solutions architect from Berlin says there's no such thing as no design, there's just good design and bad design. Our alliances team are all about holding that design and making sure that what we set out to do through our technology and services partnerships actually works for our channel partners and for our internal team. TR: Has your vision and/or strategy changed in the last two years? LW: I’d say it’s crystallised. When I arrived, my job was to create some sort of story because there wasn't one that we could grow from; there was just a list of products, which I couldn't really see any connections between. We've taken the cybersecurity landscape and made it really simple for everybody to understand, with specialisms in workspace security, multi-cloud security and the IT management of those environments, with identity as a fourth specialism across those three areas. That has become our framework. What we realised is that when you're talking about technology products a story can hang all those things together, but in reality it doesn't do anything at a technical level to bring those things together, which is why having a services team is so important. In my first year the core question was do we build or buy? I quickly realised that the answer was to buy because it takes a long time to build a services capability and people with technical talent want to work with other technically talented people. If you’re a distributor, how do you build that team in such a competitive recruitment market? The acquisition route has enabled us to take a brilliant team as a unit and build on our framework with services. Now, it's all about geographic expansion. We launched in Berlin, which is our foothold in the DACH region. We've got Benelux covered with the Utrecht team. We TR: Has Distology been successful in attracting people who may not have considered a career in IT before? LW: Yes, we have. If I think about our Berlin team, the last identity engineer we hired there and are now training was a web developer. You could say she was already in a technical role, but web development is actually very different to identity services engineering. Our Marketing Director had never worked in the technology sector before – she had been doing marketing for a commercial property company. Our Senior Solutions Engineer was a teacher. One of our top sales people in the UK came from a furniture company. We’re saying ‘It doesn't matter what your background is. If you've got transferable skills, this is just another set of knowledge you need to learn. IT is fast moving and exciting, it's rewarding at a financial level and you get lots of great opportunities for travel and so forth’. TR: What are your responsibilities as Chief Product Officer? LW: My headline role is a visionary one. I was hired to help shape the strategy and the direction of the company so that we're still relevant in 5 to 10 years’ time. When we have our executive leadership meetings, Hayley leads from the front, I look at why we should do something and the conceptual hypothesis around it. Then the rest of the directors and leaders work out how we're going to do it and turn bright ideas into reality. It really is a brilliant team of minds, which I love working in. By trading off the two, we end up making the right decisions on which initiatives to follow. That's a big part of my job: where are we going and what do we need in our portfolio to be attractive to customers? Then, there’s the story that goes around that. I lean very heavily on the Marketing Director to bring that to life, but I set out the vision and story for why we're doing things. More functionally, I'm responsible for our technology and services alliances; I'm responsible for our internal IT; I'm also responsible for our solutions engineering Hayley Roberts
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