New Integrity360 chairman sets €200m revenue goal following private equity investment

Ian Brown was appointed as the cybersecurity firm's new chairman following August Equity's acquisition last week

The new executive chairman of Integrity360 hopes the business can become one of the leading cybersecurity companies in the UK, following its acquisition by August Equity last week.

Ian Brown, the former executive chairman of SecureData, has taken on the role with ambitions to grow the business "significantly" and said he expects revenue to reach €200m "over the coming few years" through both organic growth and M&A.

Integrity360 claims it achieved 15 per cent revenue growth in 2020, driven by customers moving to protect remote working environments as well as their cloud-based operations, with Brown confident of building on the firm's recent success.

"The investment from August and the changes that we're making are all about turbocharging the existing growth plan to make it go faster and basically achieve more," Brown explained.

"The ambitions for the business have just got a lot broader in the sense that our intention is to create a pan-European cyber services business, so not just operating in Ireland, but obviously in the UK, and indeed, in other markets across Europe.

"I'm confident that we'll be able to significantly, as in by several orders of magnitude, grow our business in the UK, and we've already had conversations with potential customers during the course of the last few days."

Announcing the acquisition, Integrity360 said the investment from August Equity, which is among the most active private equity houses operating in the UK channel, would be used to fuel an "extensive acquisition programme" across Europe.

The Check Point, F5 and Forcepoint partner is looking for companies that can serve as a platform in the "major" geographic territories being targeted, Brown said, and must fit Integrity360's ethos of having "great customer relationships".

Brown served as SecureData's executive chairman but left after it was sold by August Equity to Orange back in 2019, though insists that Integrity360 might not follow the same path.

"The thing about August and one of the reasons I partner with them is that they do not operate to any particular fixed timescales," he said.

"Obviously, at some point, being a private equity house, they need to realise the investment. At some point there will be an exit event but that's many, many years away.

"And also, an exit event may not be a whole exit event. When we get to €200m in revenues, the annex event might be a flotation, because obviously at that sort of size we'd be able to attract a significant market cap on any of the major exchanges around Europe. So a public flotation selling some of those shares could be an option."

The purchase of Integrity360 continues a recent trend of private equity firms investing in cybersecurity companies.

And Brown believes the ever-growing need for effective cybersecurity, following a spate of high-profile cyber attacks of large businesses and public bodies, means there is an enormous opportunity for companies operating in the sector.

"Cyber has rocketed, certainly in the last five years. Many small businesses didn't really worry about cyber up until about three years ago," he added.

"And then certainly things like GDPR have made it much more relevant on some more boardroom agendas and so forth.

"But even for medium-sized businesses, it's difficult to hire suitable cyber skills bearing in mind that the cyber skills you need today are not necessarily the cyber skills you need tomorrow because the threat landscape is constantly changing.

"So you've got to be constantly investing, and if you're not in the business and your primary business is as an airline or an estate agent, why do you want to spend time and energy constantly worrying about that?"