technologyreseller.co.uk 09 Continued... INTERVIEW answer I give to any vendor I speak to is that we've got 1,400 partners ready to buy your technology, if it's the right fit for them. Distribution has had to evolve at some pace because cloud came and then cyber with it, so it's a very different space to what it was 10 years ago. Q: How has your reseller customer base changed? AS: It's got bigger, as Brigantia has grown, but we’ve also seen the impact of private equity and consolidation. Some of our best partners are private equity-backed MSPs and some of those are acquiring every other week, some every other month. That level of acquisition is clearly causing some stir in the channel, whether that's due to route-to-market consolidation or the fact that it can create serious churn for certain technologies. The VAR space is completely different to what it was 10 years ago. VARs have either grown to be absolute behemoths, very well advertised, big, big, big companies, or they've had to evolve and become managed service providers. There's very few highly successful sub-£20 million VARs anymore. Very, very few. With VARs it’s more about sales enablement than the service wrap that’s needed in the MSP space. Q: What are fastest growing areas of your portfolio? AS: That's an easy one to answer. Thanks to Google and Yahoo’s new rules requiring DMARC to be properly configured on sender domains, we have signed more MSP partners to our latest vendor technology, Sendmarc, since signing them on 22nd December, than in the whole first year of any other vendor. That demand's being driven by changes from these two massive technology companies and by new PCI compliance rules coming in early next year that require DMARC configuration to be done properly. Twelve months ago, the risks of not having a domain properly configured were relatively unknown and the fact that you could basically impersonate any domain in the world that wasn't configured properly. DMARC has created a whole new revenue stream for channel partners and we've got a number of case studies of partners that have created tens of thousands of pounds of profit off the back of doing an opt out campaign into their customers relating to DMARC. In the VAR space, it's a whole new area of the market that’s relevant to every single end customer. Very rarely do channel partners get the opportunity to take a solution to every single customer. Sendmarc is fantastic technology and great guys to work with. I spent a lot of time with them at InfoSec last week. It's really refreshing for channel partners to be working with an organisation like that. Q: What can we look forward to from Brigantia in the second half of the year? AS: We have our major partner event on the 2nd and 3rd of October at Twickenham Stadium. That’s always a highlight of the year. All our major vendor partners are involved and we’ll have about 150 to 200 channel partners there across the two days. Our Keynote speaker is Charlie McMurdie, the first female head of the Police National Cyber Crime Unit. It will be really interesting to hear what she has to say. recurring revenue to their business or through sales and marketing initiatives like our recently launched vendor-specific partner toolkits. These are designed from the ground up to enable an MSP to take any vendor solution to their clients in a way that's easy for the client to understand instead of relying on a product presentation from a vendor who may be too close to their product to be able to articulate its real-world values and benefits. That's something we've invested heavily in and will continue to invest in. Another differentiator is the care we take to retain staff, many of whom are world experts in the areas of the market they focus on. Our product specialist teams are at the beck and call of our channel partners, supporting them day-in and day-out with their internal training initiatives or their sales efforts with clients or by speaking at events that they're there to support. That's a huge value add that we bring to the market. Q: As, I suppose, is having that focused, curated product offering. AS: We want Brigantia to be the place that channel partners buy from, rather than focusing on one specific vendor. I was on a call three or four weeks ago with a brandnew partner and I was making just this point and off the back of that they've now engaged with five of our vendors. It makes sense for them to have the benefit of our teams’ experience and one route to market, with one point of contact if something needs to be escalated. We're happy with that and with the accountability that comes with that. Our approach is very much based on the human touch and old school customer service. If you ring our office, your call be answered within two rings. It's not a case of buying some licenses and moving on. Q: How has distribution changed since 2016? AS: It's had to find its new place, its relevance. I mentioned hardware before. It is no longer about shipping and logistics and storage space; it’s about adding value to enable channel partners to generate more business themselves. Distribution has had to find relevance for vendors as well, otherwise why would they not go direct to channel partners. The Angus Shaw, Director Watch the full interview
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