01732 759725 INTERVIEW 10 Events are an important part of how we work with our community and we've got various others in the coming weeks and months, as well as keynote presentations by Brigantia product specialists at partner events. If we do sign an 18th vendor before Christmas that, too, will get a huge amount of focus. We’re in final discussions with a couple of vendors but everything’s got to be absolutely right for us to bring any new vendor to market. Q: It will be interesting to see who that might be. As well as protecting their own customers MSPs need to protect themselves. Is that something that Brigantia addresses? AS: That's a really good point. MSPs have to eat their own dog food and to put it bluntly that’s something they often don’t do. How can you be a managed service provider looking after end clients if you're not taking reasonable steps to protect yourself? As a minimum, all MSPs should be working towards Cyber Essentials certification and quickly as I expect there to be more regulations relating to how MSPs look after themselves and the level of service their end customers can expect. We expect most of our MSPs to buy the services they work with us on. Some are on an NFR basis, but others are not. It's an investment every business should make. Q: Longer-term, how do you expect the market to develop? AS: It’s an interesting question. The market always changes and right now the topic of AI is almost impossible to escape. I'm sure it will continue to have an influence, certainly in marketing messages. How it impacts technologies as a whole is another conversation. We're still seeing unprecedented demand for third party patching of applications. We're seeing so many technologies claiming to do a good job in that space that really don’t provide the level or depth of service that a lot of channel partners expect. So I think that area will continue to grow. Bridgeworks appoints Nuvola Distribution as first global distributor Lymington-based storage networking technology innovator Bridgeworks is expanding its sales reach across EMEA with the appointment of Nuvola Distribution as its first global distributor. The partnership will see Nuvola expand its offering with Bridgeworks’ patented WANrockIT and PORTrockIT WAN acceleration technology for TCP/IP and block storage traffic. Bridgeworks’ high-speed routing technology is distinct from and complementary to the SD-WAN and Backup and Replication categories. It can be used uniquely or in combination with these technologies by medium and large enterprises to increase throughput across the WAN. A key differentiator of Bridgeworks’ WAN Acceleration technologies is the use of AI, machine learning and data parallelisation to increase the speed and volume of data flows over wide area networks (WANs). They are data agnostic and mitigate latency and packet loss to permit encrypted data to be sent and received over thousands of miles, while increasing bandwidth utilisation by up to 98%. David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks, says the initial goal of the partnership with Nuvola is to enable half a dozen strategic reseller partners in the UK and to expand into major European markets in year one. “We would like to establish the Bridgeworks name and portfolio across EMEA,” he said. Simon Marrion, Business Development Manager EMEA at Bridgeworks, added that Bridgeworks is committed to developing a mutually beneficial relationship. He said: “The Hyperscalers want you to buy all your technology via their low-touch online marketplaces and that includes complex infrastructure technology. It’s a real threat to the value chain of the traditional reseller landscape. We understand the value of having strong business partnerships, and Nuvola has comprehensive knowledge about the diverse array of different reseller partners, their categories and operating models.” We've talked about DMARC already. Identity theft and fraud is something that really resonates with end users, regardless of whether they're technical or not, and demand for that will continue to grow at pace. There'll be millions and millions of domains added to the fully compliant DMARC list, I've no doubt. We're not seeing any slowdown in traditional password management either, and we're looking closely at other areas I can't go into too much detail about, the dark web and a few other areas. I've got no doubt that the market will evolve and that MSPs will continue to play a massive part in the delivery of services and supporting their clients. Q: What longer term goals do you have for Brigantia? AS: I've got big ambitions for the growth of the business. There are a minimum of 7,000 MSPs in the UK and we’ve only got 1,400 of them at the moment. My ambition is for us to take a good chunk of those in the coming years. And we'll continue to invest heavily in resources to make sure our existing partners enjoy the benefits of old school customer service. Hopefully, we'll have some exciting additions to the portfolio and our growth will continue – whether that’s in the UK or beyond, we’ll see. Q: If you were to give one piece of advice to MSPs what would it be? AS: Don't stand still. One of the hardest things for MSPs is actually selling, but if you're just renewing your customers every year you're not going to grow. Good money says that private equity will come along and maybe buy one of your customers at some point or, worse, one of them might go bust. If that happens to a very large customer the consequences could be serious. So, don't stand still from a sales and marketing or a technology standpoint. It’s really important to take advice on sales and marketing, which is where we feel we can really add value and have high-level conversations. continued... Brigantia Vendors – 17 and counting n Action1 n Arista n Conceal n CyberSmart n eSentire n Heimdal n Hornet Security n ITagree n Keeper n knowBe4 n Next n Octiga n Parallels n Redstor n Rootshell Security n Sendmarc n Trillion David Trossell
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