New Infinigate UK boss: 'Our opportunity to grow in the UK is significant'

Justin Griffiths opens up on growing the VAD' MSP business and his ambitions to seize a larger share of the mid-market space

Infinigate is in a "strong position" to scale its UK operations and grab more share of the mid-market, according to its new UK boss Justin Griffiths.

Griffiths - who most recently served as group director of software solutions at CMS Distribution - took the reins from long-standing chief exec Murray Pierce in August and has since spent that time meeting the team and settling in to lead the cybersecurity VAD.

Meeting customers virtually has been a challenge as their time has become consumed with phone and video calls, he said, adding that Infinigate has managed to navigate this challenge so far, resulting in an "extremely positive" September.

"We saw extremely positive and strong growth in September, which helps our quarter," he told CRN.

"We're in good double-digit plus growth for the year already and the pipeline looks quite encouraging for the remainder of the financial year. There are encouraging signs now, but of course, we don't want to get too carried away because things can obviously change.

"The mid-market space is a little bit more buoyant than it has been - which is encouraging - and enterprise customers and enterprise-type projects are still at risk, but even they're starting to gain a little momentum again."

Infinigate UK is on a hiring spree, mainly in business development and sales roles in order to bolster its growth ambitions in the mid-market space, Griffiths said, adding that the size of the business will look very different in five years' time to what it is now.

"The priority between now and the end of the year is to resource the business to the right levels and to deliver against the company's expectation on growth going into 2021," he elaborated.

"Over the next five years, the business will look a lot different to what it is now in terms of its size; we've added seven new vendors to the portfolio which is extremely exciting so that will enable us to deliver strong organic growth going into next year."

The VAD's "small" presence in the UK offers a lot of opportunity for growth and it does not plan on deviating away from its cybersecurity focus in order to achieve this growth, according to Griffiths.

"We represent such a small part of the UK market our opportunity to scale and grow is significant, so, watch this space, there's a lot more exciting stuff to happen from Infinigate," he declared.

"We're not going to deviate away from what we're good at; we are a security distributor and a very good one. We're only going to get better and stronger and we're not looking to diversify into other product sets that will detract from what we're trying to achieve - we want to be seen as the go-to security distribution partner of choice."

As part of this mid-market ambition, Infinigate will be offering more attractively priced products to customers who have reduced IT budgets, the chief exec said.

There's a lot of opportunity out there; a lot of the tier one vendors are going through a lot of changes and lots of customers are looking for really credible alternatives because budgets are constantly being reviewed and they can't all afford the very expensive solutions," he explained.

"But there are a lot of strong credible solutions out there that deliver just as well, but at a more affordable price so that's where we see the opportunity for us. The mid-market will continue to be a strong market of opportunity as it's a lot more predictable and there's a lot more opportunity in there to grow."

At the outset of 2020, Infinigate's global boss Klaus Schlichtherle outlined the distributor's ambitions to bolster its MSP business in the UK. Griffiths said that ambition was still in its "infancy" but progress is being made.

"It's going well so far but we've only been really in play for a couple of months," he said.

"The primary focus has been onboarding the vendors, with the most recent addition being Hornetsecurity. We now have four or five vendors that are dedicated to the UK as part of the overall European strategy and we will continue to build out that portfolio and we have dedicated resource now in play.

"There are five thousand MSPs in the market and we're only scraping the surface, so there's a huge amount of opportunity for us."