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Exclusive UK and Ireland managing director plans to increase partner support
SME-sized resellers and MSSPs are going to be getting increased backing from the distributor
It’s been nine months since Rob Tomlin took up the role of managing director for UK and Ireland at Exclusive Networks, and sights are already being set on ensuring 2025 is a year of growth.
As he looks back, Tomlin describes the first three months as weeks spent getting to know the business. Since then, he has been looking at where the firm is heading and identifying opportunities.
Exclusive has managed to carve out a solid reputation in the cyber security market, and has built a global operation that can support a widening number of vendors and partners.
For Tomlin, his first nine months have been spent getting to know both the company and the market, and understanding the nature of a security business.
“I’m delighted that I joined the company, and delighted that I got into the world of cyber security,” he said. “I inherited a really brilliant business which has been quietly going by what it does for the last decade-plus.
“It’s gone from what was a very small startup acquisition in the UK and Ireland to what is now, very humbly and very quietly, the largest, by far, pure play cyber security distributor,” said Tomlin.
“We’ve built out a great vendor lineup, a great services offering, and we’ve been very important to our customers.”
What lies ahead
With just a few weeks left in 2024, thoughts are turning to what lies ahead, and Tomlin has already been working on a multi-faceted strategy.
The portfolio keeps expanding, with the channel player sealing a relationship with NetApp earlier today as one of its latest moves to make sure it has data resiliency as part of its story.
The NetApp signing backs up one of the main planks of the strategy, to create a strong portfolio and encourage collaboration across the ecosystem to arm partners with more sale opportunities.
“We’ve got very ambitious growth plans overall, and from a UK and Ireland perspective, we’ve got four core investment big ticket focuses for next year,” he said.
Ecosystem collaboration
Driving the ecosystem of vendors is the first focus to help connect the areas of collaboration across the household names it works with, such as Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet and Rubrik, to high-growth emerging players such as Sentinel One and Netskope.
“They all collaborate,” he said. “Our job is to build that tapestry together and help our partners and our vendors work together, and that’s something that we’re really focused on, and we’re being successful in, and that will help our larger customers and our mid-sized customers grow at pace.”
SMB growth
The second area is deepening its involvement with the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market to support those smaller partners that can help unlock more activity.
“We want to give the Exclusive experience to the SMB world of partners and help them grow their cyber business,” he said. “The plan is, as we go into next year, to double down on servicing the SMB partners, recruiting through a mixture of apprenticeship programmes, a mixture of growing out our SMB sales team and giving them that Exclusive experience to that next level of partner.
“That’s not us diluting anything towards our large partners, because we’re completely committed to them and do a great job across all the large multinationals, large partners and GSIs, but really, just enabling the SMB marketplace to get more.”
Managed services
Another area of activity for Tomlin and the team is to grow the managed services business to make sure partners can meet customer demands for the as-a-service model.
“The next big thing for us is to grow in the MSSP market,” he said. “The MSP, CSP customers really want to consume cyber as a service. And a lot of our resellers are building out managed security practices ... or they want to venture into that space through our services and through our vendor portfolio. We think that’s a big opportunity for us.”
Tomlin said Exclusive had already put some of the pieces in place to support MSPs, including the recent launch of its XPS finance programme, where it was able to divide annuity payments into monthly chunks to work with a managed services model.
“It’s working with our vendors to make sure that we’re able to take the offerings that the vendors make and make them consumable for an MSSP in a way that they can then provide it as a service,” he said.
“A lot of that is around realising that an MSSP is not a ‘buy, sell’ company,” said Tomlin. “It’s providing an outcome. First, consume it the way that you want to consume it. Second, it’s curating a solution stack or vendor stack the MSSPs want and need, and is relevant to them.
“Finally, service them in the way they want to be serviced,” he said. “We’re going to be investing in additional resources to cover the MSSP market.”
NetApp signing
The final plank of the strategy is to ensure there are no gaps that would undermine a solution-selling approach. That is the reason for the NetApp signing.
“We made a decision probably four or five months ago that we needed to bring in a data management and data security vendor to help our customers grow and to grow our business overall,” said Tomlin. “We selected NetApp as that vendor, and we went through a whole process with them, and we’re delighted to say that we’ve signed a full distribution contract for the UK and Ireland, and that will sit perfectly as our data management, data security vendor.
“It’s a marquee signing for us, and we’re super excited about it,” he said. “I know our customers are going to be very excited about it – and their end user customers – and we think our core vendors are also going to be excited, because they’ve got a lot of collaboration. A number of vendors work really closely with them. So, it’s going to be a win, win, win for us, our vendors and our customers.”
Artificial intelligence
The surge of interest in artificial intelligence (AI) has seen the spotlight fall on data, with users recognising that unless they get a grip on their disparate siloes of information, the promised insights and benefits of automation won’t be unlocked.
Security is an afterthought in many AI deployments, and Tomlin expects that to also create opportunities for partners.
“We see AI creating so much security opportunity,” he added. “They’re not thinking about security first – they’re thinking about getting the Nvidia, getting the bit of storage and then just getting this stood up quickly. That’s creating a lot of follow-up opportunity on security for us, and we’re already in the process of working with our partners on some very big bids.”
When it comes to closing out 2024 and looking ahead to the next couple of years, Tomlin is feeling upbeat.
“Exclusive has quietly gone about what it’s done and got to a position of leadership, and I joined knowing that in doing the right thing I would be able to accelerate it,” he said.
“I see a much bigger and more expansive Exclusive over the next two to three years. We’re on track to achieve great things.”
