‘It just keeps going up’: ITAIA sets sights on 25 per cent top line growth

The French MSP’s leaders, Marin Barjhoux and Grégory Moulis, talk €2.4m turnover, regulated finance push and plans to accelerate recurring business

French MSP ITAIA is eyeing its next revenue milestone after building a €2.37m (£2m) business that is now fuelled almost entirely by recurring revenues.

The Paris-based organisation, which manages around 3,000 devices across approximately 54 customers, is targeting around 25 per cent annual expansion as it sharpens its focus on regulated financial services.

“It just keeps going up,” ITAIA president Marin Barjhoux tells CRN.

The MSP says its turnover has historically risen significantly year-on-year, although its latest period has remained broadly level with the previous year after the company pulled back on marketing activity.

ITAIA is now looking to put its foot back on the accelerator, with €2.37m in current turnover and a business increasingly built around recurring managed services.

“The objective is 25 per cent. It’s always a nice round number,” systems and network engineer Grégory Moulis tells CRN.

“We need to maintain some level of increase. If it isn’t 25 per cent, it’s not a big deal.”

As ITAIA becomes larger, its leadership acknowledges that maintaining the percentage increases possible from a smaller revenue base will become progressively harder.

The MSP could eventually switch to targets based on adding a fixed number of managed endpoints each year rather than maintaining a specific percentage increase.

“Now, achieving 25 per cent growth from 3,000 endpoints doesn't mean adding the same number of endpoints as before,” Moulis explains.

“The scale is different. Maybe one day we'll change the formula and say we need to add 500 endpoints a year or 1,000 endpoints a year.”

Recurring revenues underpin ITAIA ambitions

The composition of ITAIA’s current turnover gives the MSP confidence in its ability to build from its existing base.

Alongside managed services, the company occasionally delivers large one-off tech projects covering facilities such as hospitals and airports for foreign governments.

But none of those contracts contributed to the €2.4m figure for its latest year.

“This year, we haven’t had one of those projects,” Moulis says.

“Aside from hardware, virtually 100 per cent of our revenue is recurring.

“Normally, if nothing changes and no customers leave, we can at least repeat the previous year's performance. From there, the goal is to add new customers and keep growing.”

International projects and UK expansion

ITAIA’s core managed services business remains heavily concentrated in Paris, but the MSP also participates in large international infrastructure projects.

Through one customer, the company delivers IT components for turnkey developments including hospitals and airports built for foreign governments.

Those packages can encompass IT, telephony and Wi-Fi infrastructure.

Most projects have historically been in francophone sub-Saharan Africa, with ITAIA also seeing some opportunities connected to reconstruction projects in Ukraine.

When significant contracts land, ITAIA estimates they can represent roughly a fifth to a seventh of annual turnover, although the contribution varies substantially.

The company is consequently interested in finding more partners delivering similar turnkey infrastructure projects.

“We’d like to find other players like this customer who do the same thing because we know how to do it,” Moulis says.

“We’ve already done it several times. We know how it works.”

Despite its international project work, ITAIA does not currently see a compelling case for establishing a conventional MSP operation in the UK.

It views the British managed services market as significantly more mature than France and believes its capabilities could make a greater difference in less developed markets.

“There are already too many people. They’ve already got what they need,” Barjhoux says of the UK.

“I have the impression you’ve got the US setting the market, the British following the American model and we’re the third wheel, watching what the other two do and then following.

“I don’t think we’d teach them anything.”

For now, the MSP believes opportunities further east or south could prove more attractive.

ITAIA focuses on regulated finance

Central to the next stage of that strategy is a more deliberate focus on regulated financial services.

ITAIA historically built much of its customer base through word of mouth, which gradually resulted in the MSP developing a concentration of customers in finance.

The company has now formalised that specialisation.

When rebuilding its website and marketing strategy, ITAIA repositioned its messaging directly around regulated finance rather than presenting itself as a generalist MSP.

“We’ve really specialised in regulated finance and that comes across throughout everything we do,” Moulis says.

“That doesn’t mean we’d turn away other customers but someone working in regulated finance who visits our website will immediately recognise the language and find what they’re looking for.”

ITAIA believes regulatory requirements across different industries are also gradually converging, making capabilities developed for financial organisations applicable beyond its core target market.

Microsoft, Kaseya and Dell account for ‘95 per cent’ of spend

ITAIA’s tech ecosystem remains concentrated around three major vendors.

The company describes its email, identity, Teams and endpoint operating system estate as “100 per cent Microsoft”, while its backup and management tooling largely comes from Datto and Kaseya.

Dell dominates its endpoint business.

“Microsoft, Kaseya and Dell probably cover 95 per cent of our invoices,” Moulis says.

BeMSP is its primary partner for production tooling, while the company also works with Arrow, Dell and TD SYNNEX for licensing and hardware.

The leaders explain that maintaining multiple hardware routes has helped it navigate periods of limited availability, with supply conditions having since improved.

Customer AI adoption opens new opportunity

ITAIA also sees the rapid adoption of AI by its customers creating a potential new services opportunity, although the MSP is still working out what form that proposition should take.

Customers are increasingly connecting platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude with corporate environments including Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Teams.

That has left ITAIA advising customers about the security and governance implications of giving AI systems access to company data.

“People know how to use AI without us,” Moulis tells CRN.

“Our problems start when they decide to connect their tools to AI.”

ITAIA says customer preferences are moving quickly, with businesses switching their attention between AI platforms over periods of only a few months.

Despite not yet having a dedicated commercial proposition around the trend, the company believes there is a gap for MSPs to fill.

“We can see there’s a market because customers have their limits and, fundamentally, this isn’t our original area of expertise,” adds Moulis.

“There’s a gap between the two, and somebody is going to fill it.”

AI agents join ITAIA workforce

ITAIA is also using AI to increase the capacity of its relatively small workforce.

The company employs around 12 people, primarily across technical roles, with staff becoming increasingly specialised in areas such as cybersecurity.

Internally, the organisation has traditionally assigned individual employees as “champions” for particular applications within its technology stack.

It is now beginning to automate that model.

The MSP has created autonomous agents for individual products alongside an orchestrating agent dubbed “The Boss”, which communicates with the other agents and retrieves information across ITAIA’s systems.

The agents can search ITAIA’s tools, pull information into its PSA, enrich tickets and categorise them before an engineer begins working on the issue.

“I think there will come a time when we won’t need one person managing each tool because some of that will be automated,” Moulis says.

“For now, though, we’re mainly using AI for management tasks and reporting.”

The efficiencies mean ITAIA does not currently anticipate significant recruitment.

“If we grow by 100 per cent, we’ll need someone else,” Moulis says.

“Otherwise, we’re good where we are.”