01732 759725 08 INTERVIEW With Angus Shaw, Director of specialist cybersecurity distributor Brigantia Q: To start with, please could you give me a quick overview of Brigantia. Angus Shaw (AS): Brigantia is a cybersecurity distributor. We specialise in bringing unique technologies to the UK market. We have about 17 technologies in our portfolio that we bring to around 1,400 channel partners. Those channel partners form part of the Brigantia community and range from one-man-band MSPs through to some of the largest technology companies in the world. Q: Has Brigantia always been a cybersecurity specialist? AS: Brigantia was formed through a management buyout from a much larger player called Claranet in 2016. At the time we were focused on broadband and some cloud backup and other recurring revenue streams, having been a hardware buying group in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Our focus on cyber started about the same time when our main shareholder attended an event at the Danish embassy with Heimdal Security, who are still a vendor partner today. We identified there and then the opportunity in cybersecurity, and going down that route has been very good for the business. Q: What are the advantages of being a specialist? AS: There are benefits for partners and benefits for vendors, and the main one for both groups is our focus. Having only 17 vendors, maybe 18 by Christmas, allows us to be very specialist in what we do. We can be outsourced experts for those vendors, acting as an extension of their teams. We also act as an extension of our partners’ teams because we know those vendors inside out, whereas it's not possible for channel partners to know every single vendor they might have to work with in the depth that’s sometimes required. We act as outsourced support for those channel partners. Q: You like to sign vendors at quite an early stage in their development. How do you select them? AS: We take our vendor selection process really, really seriously – it’s what we live and die by. We want the Brigantia seal of approval to really mean something, so we take vendors through quite a rigorous selection process. It is very much technology-driven, and the first requirement is that they must be a solution to a genuine problem. I was talking with someone the other day and they repeated a remarkable stat, I think from Canalys, that channel partners have 80,000 vendor partners they could work with. We want to bring to partners what we believe are genuinely the best solutions available. Our focus is to have a technology at every layer of the cybersecurity defensive system – 365 security, endpoint security etc. – and we try to avoid overlapping those vendors so that we can be really clear about what we think is the best route for channel partners to take. Once we've been through that very indepth technical and compliance process to determine whether a partner is suitable, we have to be certain that any relationship makes sense commercially for our partners and for ourselves. I'm always very open with channel partners that to provide the service that we do, day in and day out, with the investment in the team that that involves, we have to make money as well. Unlike traditional distribution, working at much smaller percentages, we need to invest properly back into our partners and into that technology expertise. Q: What do you mean when you describe yourself as a value-added distributor? AS: The value piece is really important because we don't want to just sell something and move on and the opportunities in shifting tin, for a business of our size, are limited as most channel partners can buy on Amazon more cheaply than they can from a business like ours. What we mean by adding value is having a clarity of message and the ability to articulate clearly to partners why these solutions are of benefit to them and their customers, and then helping them day to day in their business, for example by identifying new opportunities to add In June, James Goulding, Editor of Technology Reseller, met up with Angus Shaw, Director of Brigantia, to find out about developments at the specialist cybersecurity distributor. Here are edited highlights of their conversation. The video recording can be viewed in full at www.technologyreseller.uk. Q&A Joel Chimoindes Angus Shaw
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