Trustmarque's new boss places bet on machine learning

Andrew Carr says the Microsoft partner has started working more closely with other Capita-owned brands Computerland and S3

The new managing director of Trustmarque has pinpointed machine learning and the Internet of Things (IoT) as key investment areas for the Capita-owned VAR.

Andrew Carr told CRN that his main goal is to "accelerate what was already in place" at the £200m-revneue Microsoft partner, but revealed the firm will be targeting IoT growth.

"We recognise that IoT and machine learning presents a great opportunity for us," said Carr, who joined Capita in November as managing director of Technology Products and Trustmarque.

"People talk about it a lot, but there's not really a great deal happening around data aggregation and turning that into something useful; people seem more concerned about making sure something is connected, rather than what you do with it.

"What we're trying to do with a few customers is get them thinking differently about moving into a predictive world where we can work with them to define some algorithms that will allow them to automate services processes or get access to information much faster. This is based on the fact that by 2020 there will be 50 billion connected objects across the world, all of which will be creating data."

Since acquiring Trustmarque for £57m last June, Capita has issued its first ever profit warning, and has restructured its business.

Trustmarque, which sits in Capita's Technology Solutions arm, has been partially integrated with two of Capita's existing reseller brands, namely hardware reseller Computerland and storage integrator S3, Carr confirmed.

"Within Technology Solutions we have approximately 2,500 customers across five or six business areas, and we've been trying to really identify those customers and make sure what we're not doing is a single transaction to a single customer," he said.

"It's a very logical and complementary set of capabilities that those three businesses [Trustmarque, Computerland and S3] bring together, so we are working very closely from a sales and marketing point of view. We are bringing those businesses much more closely together, but we also recognise the strength in some of those individual brands as well. But we don't just talk to customers now about reselling some HP kit or EMC kit, we can give them a total IT asset management story from the vendor relationships we have, through to implementation, through to management."

Trustmarque generated £99m of its £192m sales from Microsoft-related business in the year before it was acquired. It claimed at the time that it was Microsoft's number-one reseller of software licences, and that it generated 42 per cent of the software giant's NHS/healthcare revenues.

However, Carr (pictured) said Trustmarque is moving deeper into the cloud market in tandem with its largest vendor.

"We know that as Microsoft move into their new financial year in July there will be an accelerated emphasis on helping customers move into that cloud services consumption model, rather than the traditional model of licensing," he said. "We believe we are well positioned at the forefront of that as quite an early adopter."

Trustmarque's three key propositions are around the modern workplace with Microsoft Office 365, Skype for Business and SharePoint, cloud migration with Microsoft Azure and business insights with Microsoft and IBM, Carr said.

"There's this assumption that post acquisition you need to change the strategy, but what we've done with Trustmarque is to accelerate the strategy that was already in place - because it was successful," he said. "We are trying to retain what we've got, develop it further, and accelerate some of the work we are doing around the Microsoft cloud services provider programme to develop some intellectual property to differentiate in the market."