Infinigate 'looking to grow beyond Europe in this year's expansion plans'

CPI chatted with the VAD boss who gave more details into Infinigate’s ‘record’ results

Infinigate Group wants to expand outside Europe following its ‘record' financial results where annual revenues grew 26 per cent to €813m.

The full-year results coincided with a record first quarter for the cybersecurity specialist, which now has 80 per cent of its revenue from subscription-based services, it claims.

Speaking with our sister title Channel Partner Insight, Infinigate CEO Klaus Schlichtherle said the vendors he is seeing move to this subscription/OPEX model were more of a mixed bag.

"What we have seen specifically are the endpoint vendors, and also a bit on the firewall side," he said.

"We saw a lot of business shifting into that space, but it was really on a broad base with lots of different vendors."

Schlichtherle then delved a little more into his views on this switch to subscription-based models.

"I think the shift is happening and it's on a much bigger scale across the board," he said.

"I think over the next three to five years the whole shift will happen, and I think that's one of the biggest industry changes we've been seeing for a long time.

"Specifically those vendors who are aiming for the SMB market, they've been on the forefront of that development, because for them, it's much more attractive because they need to touch a lot of connections.

"There's a huge incentive to change your business model rather than this big enterprise."

Growth markets

On what drove Infinigate's recent earnings performance, Schlichtherle highlighted growth across "all countries" as a key driver.

"France had a particularly good year for us. Also with the acquisition of D2B Informatique, that added a lot of revenue in France but also organic, so we grew the French business quite remarkably, I would say.

"The DACH region also grew quite nicely. That's a region which has been historically strong for us and we had other good vendors signed up and that helped us to grow the reach very aggressively."

Priorities for the year

Looking beyond the group's full-year results, Schlichtherle outlined to CPI some of Infinigate's top priorities for the year ahead.

"We will go out for further acquisitions, that's clear. We did the acquisition in France but there are still some whitespots in our landscape," he explained.

"We will also look beyond Europe, and that's a priority for us.

"The second one is the digitalization of the business, we are really investing heavily there.

"While the third part is strengthening the value-add in our business so we can offer our SOCplus product to mid-size resellers to the end users."