Here, Trustmarque’s Cybersecurity Practice Director James Holton discusses the company’s transition from a traditional Microsoft house to a well-rounded service provider with a growing cybersecurity division.
Since exiting corporate parent Capita in 2022, Trustmarque has been accelerating growth activities with the aim of doubling the size of its business. This includes a transition towards a recurring revenues model and leading with managed services, according to Trustmarque’s Cybersecurity Practice Director James Holton.
“Recurring revenue is absolutely what we're focusing on,” he noted. “We're moving away from being a product business into a services model. What we're seeing with our services division is faster than market-average growth statistics, so it is key for us and that's the transition we're going on now.” This will drive its ongoing aim of shedding a legacy reputation as a traditional Microsoft house and updating its outward identity to reflect the well-rounded service provider it has evolved into.
“When people think of Trustmarque, they still think predominantly of Microsoft,” added Holton. “Whilst Microsoft still makes up half of what we do, there is another half to Trustmarque that our customers don't know enough about.” At the forefront of this is the company’s rapidly expanding cybersecurity division. It is a particularly interesting practice to look at for Trustmarque as its current revenue split within cybersecurity is even across services and products, reflecting its ongoing transformation.
Holton is keen to shine a light on this area as there is still a large scope for growth. Of the approximately 2,500 customers that Trustmarque transacts with on a yearly basis, the provider only sells security to about 250 of them. “This represents a massive opportunity for us,” said Holton. “If only 10% of our installed customer base transact with us on security, then our priority has to be making sure that our existing customer base, and potential new clients, understand the full breadth of our capabilities.”
To do this, Trustmarque is using a human-led approach, talking to customers directly with a focus on having the right conversation at the right time. “Every single one of our customers is managed through a salesperson, he said. “We’ve got a sales force of about 100 people all sharing the message with our customers. It is those direct conversations that we really like. We want to sit in front of more of our customers, understand their security plans and discuss how we can help with those aims in the short and long term.
“What we're trying to do is maximise customer value by getting our clients talking to the right people within our organisation at the right time in their customer journey,” he added. To deliver on this, Trustmarque is recruiting to bolster the headcount in its cybersecurity division. With around 50 members of the team currently, Holton hopes to grow the division by an annual rate of 20% and how over 100 experts within the next two years. “Our customers are pleasantly surprised when we start talking about Cyber Essentials and PEN Testing capabilities because they didn’t realise, they could come to us for this, it means we can hoover up a lot more business.
“Offering security is becoming a mandatory part of being an effective reseller,” he emphasised. “If you do not have a good security story, then it is going to severely limit you in today’s market.”
Externally, Trustmarque is also upping its marketing and collateral as well as ensuring that it has an expanded presence at press and industry events. For example, the company recently ran a customer-facing event, Fusion, hosting around 200 of its customers, and demonstrated security at the forefront of its portfolio.
“Our message is that everything we offer needs to be underpinned by robust security,” added Holton. “There is not a single digital transformation journey that will not have security as the foundational pillar. For example, if we talk about AI, we start the conversation with risk management, or if we talk about cloud transformation, we must lead with compliance.”
This also bleeds into the Microsoft side of Trustmarque’s business. “You can't really interact with any part of Microsoft now without thinking security and you don't typically have many licencing conversations where security is not bought up,” he said.
An MSPs role is then to make the operational processes around this as slick as possible, according to Holton. “If you're talking to us about licencing, we're making sure that you're also talking to the security experts to broaden out that conversation,” he said.
