Vendor heavyweights drive record Exclusive Group results

Distributor sees H1 revenue jump, driven by the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet

VAD Exclusive Group saw revenue jump 19 per cent year on year in the first half of 2017, with growth driven by its core vendors.

Sales for the Paris-based VAD hit €731m (£652.6m) in H1, attributed to a strong performance from the core vendors across the group's security and datacentre arms, including Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet and Aruba Networks.

Revenue was up 28 per cent in the UK, while the strongest growth came in southern Europe, at 36 per cent.

Exclusive COO Barrie Desmond (pictured) said that these vendors are driving growth by outpacing their competitors.

"If you look at the way the market is growing in some of the key sectors that we're in - the next-generation firewall, security infrastructure - they grow single digit at the top of the range, so eight or nine per cent per annum," he said.

"The vendors that we're aligned to outpace that three, four, five times, which means that we're grabbing the growth but also market share."

The H1 results do not include any revenue generated by the recently acquired US distributor Fine Tec, but do encompass some contribution from Dutch firm TechAccess, which Exclusive acquired in January.

Helping to drive this growth, Desmond explained, is the core vendors moving into other areas of security and broadening their offering.

"For instance, Palo Alto has begun to make great inroads into the next-generation end-point market. Fortinet continue to develop and expand their fabric to protect other elements of the security infrastructure - so for instance this year we've seen their sandbox technology for zero-day malware take some growth," he said.

"As well as the core vendors taking market share from their peers, we're also beginning to open up bigger addressable markets for these vendors which in many respects is a great opportunity for the channel. Very often you just have the one technology play, but as they expand… it begins to open up the addressable market."

Emerging vendors

With the larger players making up one portion of Exclusive's portfolio, Desmond explained that the other vendors fall into two categories: emerging and growth.

"A great observation I would make is the balance that we have in our vendor portfolio," he said.

"High growth would be the likes of Nutanix, but we've been working with some new and exciting technology at the next-generation end-point like SentinelOne - we've done all the footwork in the last quarter and that is really starting to gain momentum now.

"I look at Exabeam where there is an interest in behavioural analytics and a new type of technology in the network beginning to take hold. These are some of the newer vendors we've begun to work with and there's an amazing opportunity for the channel because of the amount of vendors and tools you need now."

In July Exclusive Networks announced a deal to distribute Symantec in the UK, in a slight departure from the vendors it typically works with.

Despite signing up an established vendor, Desmond said the deal is not too dissimilar from Exclusive's typical relationships - with the distributor initially focusing specifically on new Symantec products.

"They have three or four very interesting new technologies from acquisitions and that is what interested us," he said. "If we do a good job on that, because their incumbents obviously can't, we should get some reward for it."