Trustmarque CEO Simon Williams: ‘I want to be famous for that’

CRN catches up with the top VAR after a period of leadership changes to hear how the business is positioning itself

Trustmarque is living through 2025 with a new tagline to mark its move towards being a more services-led business to its customers following a time of leadership reshuffle.

That tagline is ‘optimise to innovate’, CEO Simon Williams tells CRN.

Trustmarque, whose headcount lies somewhere between 550 and 600 people according to Williams, has seen numerous leaders come and go over the past year.

Most recently its CIO Simon Leuty stepped down from his role to launch a new artificial intelligence venture.

Former chief revenue officer Calvin Goom left the company in September after 60 days of employment.

He replaced Donavan Hutchinson, who left the CRO post in March 2024 after just 12 months to pursue his DEI consultancy venture, D&A Services International.

Now in the role is Tanaz Gould who replaced Goom in December.

Williams acknowledges the recent changes, and states Trustmarque is looking ahead in a new direction.

“As part of our change last year, it's also very much moving towards having more of a services-led, more strategic relationship with our partners and with our customers,” he says.

“Our percentage of services versus product has materially changed.

“We brought in Tanaz Gould as chief revenue officer in December and she is very much driving that more strategic relationship, more intentional relationship with clients.”

Trustmarque has “big bets” on ‘optimise to innovate’, Williams adds, with ambitions to save clients money and help them reinvest that cash in innovation.

“I want to be famous for that.

“I want people to say, ‘You’re the company that does optimise to innovate. Can you help us?’

“We save our clients a material amount of money in software license buying and in cloud optimisation, 20 per cent to 40 per cent of their spend we save.

“We then help them use that to innovate, whether it's in Copilot licenses, whether it's in IBM watsonx, whatever the innovation they're looking for. And then we help them deliver it.”

Williams describes this as a complete life cycle.

“In terms of what they want, decommissioning the stuff, because a lot of companies don't decommission it, they'll put something new in and then to save money, and then they don't follow through in terms of the cost saving.

“And then adoption of it, so that whole life cycle. If you don't use it, you're not getting the value. You don't decommission it, you're not getting the value. If it's not implemented properly, you don't get the value.

“So optimise to innovate, to have a brand presence around that would be amazing.”

What ‘more strategic’ means

Having more strategic relationships with clients and partners is top of Williams’ agenda in 2025.

Offering more insight into what this means, Williams explains it involves managing whole integrations.

“Historically, a project for us might have been that the client wants to build some new Microsoft BI reporting, and we'll go in and we'll do that.

“What we're doing now is we've got clients who are buying other companies, and we're managing the entire integration of those companies from a Microsoft or a network perspective.

“We have one measure, which is doing five lines of business with a client. In the last year, we've more than doubled the number of clients where we do five lines of business.

“We're doing bigger average size projects, more strategic projects, more strategic relationships with our partners as well.

“So my focus for this year is to do that, to add more value to our clients by doing bigger and more strategic things for them.”