technologyreseller.co.uk 39 AV continued... customer-facing communication platform will be great as well.” World domination In the meantime, Kjaersgaard plans to keep growing globally. “We have an internal saying that we want to have world domination. Maybe that's going a bit too far, but there’s no doubt that we want to take a giant leap towards the US market and take a big chunk of that, which I would say is well underway. The UK market is doing really well, and we now need to start focusing on some of those more central European markets, DACH in particular, and then of course, you have markets like APAC that we really want to hammer. In the next 10 years, building those markets out to be a big revenue stream for us will be absolutely key for the business.” Kjaersgaard describes the journey so far, from small local Danish vendor to global brand as ‘incredibly rewarding’, but picks the people who have accompanied him on that journey as his greatest highlight of the last 10 years. “We've seen so many incredibly bright people come through Heimdal. Some have left, some have also come back again, which I think speaks to the company culture and how we retain people and give them an opportunity to grow, which you wouldn't necessarily find anywhere else. So, if I was to highlight one thing in particular, it would be the fantastic young people we’ve seen come through, learning heaps and evolving their skill set. Just seeing people grow like that is tremendously rewarding.” https://heimdalsecurity.com/ Midwich Group, a global specialist audio visual distributor to the trade market, has reported record financial performance and market share gains in 2023. Unaudited full year results for the year ended 31 December 2023 show a 7.1% growth in revenue to £1,289.1m, and the distributor’s highest ever gross profit margin of 16.8%, driven by stronger technical product sales, especially in the audio market. Adjusted operating profit increased 16.6% to £59.6m, or 16.8% on a constant currency basis. Most of the distributor’s revenue growth came from seven acquisitions in the period, with just 0.8% organic revenue growth, compared to total revenue growth of 6.8% (at constant currency). Stephen Fenby, Managing Director of Midwich Group plc, said: “The Group had another strong year, both operationally and financially, improving all key metrics in a highly challenging market. Our performance reflects the fundamental strength of the business, our customer and vendor relationships, our geographic and technical solution diversity and, most of all, the skills and dedication of our team. “Despite lower demand for mainstream products, stronger technical product sales led to our highest ever gross margin percentage. A strong increase in adjusted operating profit of 17% helped us to achieve adjusted profit before tax in excess of £50 million for the first time. “Although still early into the new financial year, and being mindful of the continued challenging general economic conditions, we remain confident that 2024 will see yet another year of growth in excess of the overall market.” Midwich Group’s management remains optimistic about a strong acquisition pipeline spanning key geographies and technological sectors, signalling promising future prospects. www.midwichgroupplc.com Essentials, with its requirement for patch management and increased governance in the NHS, including DNS security, has raised awareness about cybersecurity. Plans for 2024 So, what can UK MSPs expect from Heimdal in 2024? “We’ve got some very interesting new products coming out which will target the upper end of MSPs and open up new opportunities for lower MSP players,” said Kjaersgaard. “We'll be launching a privileged account and session management tool. Where an MSP operates servers for customers, typically you'd need an administrator account on that server to manage it. What this product gives you is the ability to launch sessions into those servers just in time, which eradicates the need to have those administrator accounts resident on those servers, which of course then elevates the security posture greatly. The session management piece of that will be the recording all of those sessions for compliance purposes, storing them etc.. This is more commonplace in the upper parts of the MSP market where larger customers will have those types of requirement. Smaller customers will have the same need, but it's an unexplored part of the market today. That’ll be a very interesting launch for the MSP market that we're targeting to get out in early 2024. “Then we also have some RMM integrations that we're planning to launch in 2024. RMM is something every MSP uses that offers a level of communication with their customer base, so the ability to integrate cybersecurity with that type of You can watch our interview with Kjaersgaard on the Technology Reseller website – www.technologyreseller.uk – and learn more about Heimdal’s first 10 years at https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/heimdal-10th-anniversary/. Midwich takes gross profit margin to new high Last year, Midwich sealed a distribution agreement with Crestron for its unified communications and collaboration products
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=