28 01732 759725 CYBERSECURITY continued... and product development work fit with a cybersecurity company. When I got into it with Martyn Roberts, our services director and owner of Squareball, I discovered that what they were consistently praised for by customers and vendors was their clear focus on the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI). UX is all about research. The customer can't tell you what the problem is, because they don't necessarily know or they identify it incorrectly, so UX spend a lot of time really building out the picture of what they're trying to solve before UI come along and design the front end for it. As an industry we are guilty of turning up at the customer, knowing what we want the answer to be, listening to a few of their leaders and then saying ‘you need to buy this to solve all your problems’. The client buys it and then six months later, it is no longer working as effectively as it should because the customer has moved it from the best practice implementation you delivered. The real strength of the Distology Studios team is its methodology, its approach to listening, learning, architecting and, most importantly, delivering better outcomes. TR: Has Distology Studios been a big commercial benefit for you? LW: In the sense that they've got their existing customer base, which obviously brings new revenue into the business. But no one buys a business just to keep it the way it is, and nine months in we’re getting ready to launch a bunch of new services that will be available to our UK partners. Distology Studios is already a good addition and will become an even better one as the months and years roll by. TR: What achievements in your first two years at Distology are you most proud of? LW: As I’ve explained, my first year was all about setting out our new go to market, our three specialisms with identity as a loose fourth sitting in the middle. My second was all about pivoting the sales focus from a ‘help to sell’ to a ‘sell to help’ mentality i.e. moving away from a preconceived idea of what you want the customer to buy to asking open questions to help qualify something and only positioning technology when it makes sense to do so. To that end, we've delivered over 260 channel enablement sessions in the past year and over 120 additional engagements into end customers. In the previous year, we were probably only doing a couple of engagement sessions per month. This year is all about getting ourselves into the customer and I’d love the team to more than double the number of end customer engagements we do to generate end customer sales and support for our channel partners as an extension of their teams. That's a big focus for us. You can’t call yourself a solutions provider unless you're working with customers – as long as it’s with our channel partners in our case! TR: What impact have these initiatives had on Distology’s revenue? LW: Revenues were up 43% year on year from FY 22 to FY 23, which is very good in the current economic climate. Growth has come from broadening our portfolio and deepening our relationships with partners. The number of partners that buy more than three business lines from us has increased from 3 to 20 in the last year, so there's a lot more depth. In addition, the new technologies we have brought in have increased our attractiveness as a solution provider and helped with revenue and profit which is obviously the whole point of bringing them in. TR: How do you choose which vendors to work with? LW: Between us, Hayley and I probably get two or three requests a week and the first thing I do is look at the gaps in our offering because we have a non-compete ethos in the portfolio. A little bit of overlap is unavoidable, but we are not interested in vendors that do the same thing. I look at things like the financial position of the business. How many rounds want to go into the Nordics – and a good portion of our portfolio is willing to support our move into that region. TR: Why did you buy Squareball, a German company, rather than one in the UK? LW: When we were reviewing our options, we did look at all kinds of organisations in the UK, but we just didn't find any that fitted with our needs and culture. At the same time, we had requests from a few of our technology vendors to enter Germany and realised that we could either buy a small distributor in Germany or buy a services company in Germany and build a distribution capability on top of that. In the end, Squareball and Distology were uncannily well aligned; the values were very similar; they were already working very heavily in the identity space with Okta; and they came with glowing feedback from their customers and the vendors they worked with. TR: So is Squareball, or Distology Studios as it now is, going to be providing services for your operation in the UK as well? LW: Yes, we're going Europe-wide with a services centre of excellence for cybersecurity. That centre of excellence is going to be built on identity services to begin with, because that's where the team’s pedigree is, but they also major in product development, building web applications and other applications for significant end customers like Flink the grocery delivery company. The question for me was how to make a company that does identity services Martyn Roberts
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