Ex-Insight exec dives into new role at ambitious VAR

Former British swimming team captain Martin Williams tells CRN that dissatisfaction with customer service at VAR led him to new waters

Former Insight exec Martin Williams has jumped ship from the global VAR due to dissatisfaction with customer service levels, he told CRN.

Williams (pictured above) was client director at the £502m-revenue company in January and is now wading into new waters with London-based MSP Tecnologika.

His new venture is an end-to-end security protection provider and sees him working under co-founder and CEO Joseph Castle, who was an underling of Williams during his time at SCC a decade ago.

Castle (pictured right) co-founded Tecnologika in 2009, with an initial focus on servicing the fintech sector, but is now broadening its scope to work in other sectors.

Williams started in his role as global sales director at the company earlier this month and already has big ideas for where he wants to help take the company.

"My clients were not given the level of service that I wanted at Insight which is why I left," he explained.

"We are now approaching £18m revenue this year. I have a vision of having £100m turnover in the next five years and becoming a top 50 player globally.

"I didn't want to go to a £50m-plus business again and try to grow an existing team, I wanted to go into an established business that gave the opportunity to improve things and make it more streamlined.

"I basically wanted the feeling of having my own company but without taking the risk, and Joe has given me the opportunity to grow this business to however big we want to get."

Castle told CRN that Williams is coming on at a point where Tecnologika is plotting strategic expansion outside its traditional finance vertical.

He is planning to recruit up to 10 new people to the 24-strong team, which is based across its London headquarters, two offices in the US and Singapore.

"A lot of the work we do is stretched across services, design, implantation and support," he explained. "So there is a level of profitability that feeds back into investment.

"From a revenue perspective, investment banks trust us with their most critical operations, so there's a natural progression there to diversify across their estate, working at the end compute cycle."

The CEO added that he is seeking to build out its cloud services business, as well as adding more services to its portfolio.

The company has grown organically, but Castle did not wave off acquisitions as a way for Tecnologika to achieve its £100m goal, saying only that any acquisition would be about adding to the firm's skillset and not about geographical expansion.

Williams has spent more than 25 years in the channel, working at some of the biggest companies, including SCC and Vokhus, as well as Insight. However, his initial career was set to be in a channel of a different kind.

He was captain of the British swimming team but had to "hang up his Speedos" due to a lack of funding in the sport, a decision that would eventually lead him into his current career.

"I was in the top 16 swimmers in the world at the time, but I gave it up because there was no money in it before the lottery funded it," he said.

"After that, I had no idea what I wanted to be. I saw an ad in the paper for a company called Twin Systems that was hiring a telesales exec and I never looked back."