Ian Kilpatrick has admitted he never expected to return to distribution after accepting a Non-Executive Director role at Northamber.
The distribution veteran’s appointment was unveiled in a stock exchange announcement by the AIM-listed firm this morning.
Kilpatrick left Nuvias in 2022 after selling his cybersecurity distributor, Wick Hill, to the Rigby Group-backed business in 2015, and has since been helming Tech Channel Ambassadors (TCA).
“Coming back into distribution was never on my workplan,” he told IT Channel Oxygen.
“I’ve had a whole life since then and I wasn’t hunting for non-exec roles, so it’s very unexpected.
“I was approached. Northamber was never on my list of companies I thought I’d be going to but I had a number of meetings with [Northamber Executive Chairman] Alex [Phillips] to understand where they were and what they were doing before I said ‘yeah, this sounds really interesting’.”
Kilpatrick’s Northamber tie-up is the latest example of an industry grandee accepting a non-exec role at a leading distributor, with former Westcoast and Computacenter UK bosses Alex Tatham and Kevin James popping up at QBS Software last October, and former Softcat CEO Graeme Watt appointed President of Infinigate a month before that.
Getting to know Northamber
Known as the UK’s “oldest” distributor, Northamber ranked 22nd in IT Channel Oxygen’s most-recent Must-Know UK Distributors.
It saw revenues rise 10% year on year to £32.1m in the six months to 31 December 2024, partly on the back of two overseas acquisitions made earlier in the year. Pre-tax loss more than halved to £598,000 as efforts to deprioritise low-margin commodity business and focus on higher-margin, technical distribution saw gross margins power up from 14% to 16.1%.
It made another Dutch acquisition in February.
Northamber is on a “really interesting journey” as it doubles down on specialisms such as cyber and AV and expands internationally, Kilpatrick claimed.
“There’s a David and Goliath opportunity to come in and start making a mark against people who are much larger and settled,” he said.
“I always loved that challenge at Wick Hill.
“The other piece was, ‘can I bring anything to the equation?’, and yes, I think I can. As part of that I’ve got some background in cyber. It’s not the key element that we came to the decision on, but it’s certainly helpful.”
Asked in a recent IT Channel Oxygen Influencers podcast whether he sold up at the right time, Kilpatrick answered in the affirmative, saying Wick Hill had become a “tall poppy” in the UK and Germany.
“The timing was pretty close to what I wanted,” he said.
Kilpatrick was Chief Revenue Officer for AssetLogic from February 2023 to May 2025.
He is also Chair and Co-Founders of the TCA, a Community Interest Company on a mission to promote opportunities in the IT channel in schools.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
