Distributor Exclusive's CEO Jesper Trolle has been in position since October in probably the most difficult time in the industry. Talking to IT Europa, he sees better opportunities generally next year, mainly in the second half, and growth in cybersecurity, with more acquisitions likely.
There has been an ongoing evolution of the channel, he says. “Some have a transactional business model through reselling - a lot of customers will still buy IT this way, but we have seen strong consolidation in the channel. Then there are a lot of born-in-the-cloud partners – some industry-focused some application-focused; we have to consider how we follow the spend in that direction. Then there are the global systems integrators (GSIs)who have become a bigger part of this business. There is a big influencer channel here with the GSIs. They work with CISOs and CIOs on the consultancy side.”
He is seeing different types of channel evolve, which may mean an ecosystem of suppliers - parts of the channel may do the transactions, and then there are cloud companies that ensure renewals and sell across the enterprises.
“Some vendors’ channel programmes are still based on transactions and paying for an outcome, but not the influencing – that can be a challenge for some,” he says.
Next year, the first half may not be too different from 2020, he thinks. There is good news about vaccines, but this will not affect everyone immediately. “Things will ease in the second quarter, then we will see a strong pickup in the third and fourth quarters. There are whole industries not spending right now – travel and leisure for example. But big companies have big projects going ahead and they are spending – the mid-market and SMB has been harder hit. So we expect to see a rebound there.”
There are different macro trends and differences in regions and markets. “We have seen good growth in 2020, with strong performance in Europe, but there are markets where we think we should be growing faster and that is where we are working.”
Acquisitions will play a part in this growth; Nuaware – the latest acquisition is one which can be taken to the wider world. It is a devops, devsecops and cloud technologies-focused business. This area has become bigger and bigger where most organisations have looked at deploying through the cloud, he says and has a significant impact on security policies. The biggest testament to that is the acquisitions by big vendors - Palo Alto of Twistlock, Pure Storage of Portworx. .
“We are nimble and probably see the opportunities before our peers. We thought we would take the opportunity with Nuaware to offer the skills-set and let them do what they do best for the channel and enable the ecosystems with skills, but leveraging the Exclusive infrastructure.”
The market it will address is both the existing partners moving into cloud and the born in the cloud newer channels. “On acquisitions, we have looked at geographic coverage for a region or market and we will still do that. It is a big part of the strategy and we see it as an accelerator. We announced three acquisitions this year. But if you look at Nuaware that is different, as we are buying a capability and something we want to roll out in other markets. We have ongoing discussions with several companies – some in regions, some on capacities.”
“Particularly in security there are a lot of players and a lot of vendors. This plays to what we can do to help partners and help them build their own model around – twenty years ago it was called storage, now it is devops and devsecops,” he says.
Security as a whole will continue to grow – vendors like CrowdStrike, Zscaler and Okta are all showing strong momentum, he says “Data is increasingly important and the reality is that every company relies on that data, so they need to protect it. The threat landscape is growing and changing.”
For example, companies are using AI to protect themselves but there are also people using AI to hack into them, so data is increasingly more important, some in the cloud, some on-prem, and with data moving between them.
“That is why there is underlying growth. And there will be a change in how data is used – and a massive shift to cloud. Not every customer wants to go there, but even on-prem customers will want a cloud-like consumption. That’s is an area that will continue to grow.”
Our Predictions 2021 series of features and interviews held its first panel in early December 2020. To watch the full panel debate go to the download here: The full IT Europa Predictions 2021 feature with extra research, interviews and ideas will appear next month.
