UiPath is set to swiftly become a top-five UK vendor for Westcon, its UK&I boss has predicted as he talked through the distributor’s cyber transformation.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen at Canalys Forums EMEA 2025 earlier this month, John Nolan said Westcon’s UK business has more than doubled in size since it took the decision eight years ago to focus on cyber.
In its latest financial year, cyber generated 80% of Westcon’s $440m UK gross sales, with networking/datacentre and voice chipping in 10% apiece.
That’s a far cry from 2017, when voice generated 80% of its $200m top line.
Adding in the Cisco-focused Comstor business, Westcon-Comstor is a circa $760m-revenue business in the UK.
“My biggest bet for the next year”
In his keynote at the event, Canalys Founder Steve Brazier shared a chart showing how distributor share prices have outperformed those of resellers and SIs since the launch of ChatGPT, claiming they had benefited from AI-related enterprise tech pull through.
But Nolan put Westcon’s “strong double-digit” growth in the UK more down to astute vendor selection decisions.
“If you’re a smart distie, it’s not that difficult to focus on the right vendors and get the right vendors on board. That’s generally what’s driving the success of the business,” he said.
Nolan pinpointed Palo Alto Networks as Westcon’s largest UK vendor, followed by Zscaler and Extreme Networks. CrowdStrike, Check Point and F5 Networks are among its other core brands.
But Nolan made a bold prediction about recent robotic process automation software signing UiPath.
“It’s very rare you will onboard a vendor and be up to $1m a month in a matter of six months – and they’re hugely channel friendly and really want to invest in the channel,” he said.
“UiPath would be my biggest bet for the next year to 18 months, and I certainly see it getting into our top five vendors.”
“Friendly rivalry”
Although Nolan emphasised Westcon still has a $40m-revenue voice business that it services and manages, its cybersecurity transformation means he now sees Exclusive Networks as its closest peer.
“On a global scale we’re similar-sized businesses – I would see Exclusive as our biggest competitor, in a good way,” Nolan said.
“I think they’re really good at what they do, they offer value and have a very similar makeup to ourselves. We’re not broadline distributors. That’s no disrespect to the broadliners like TD and Arrow; that’s what they do and they do it very well. But we’re more specialist and Exclusive are as well.
“We probably benchmark ourselves against them and vice versa – it’s a friendly rivalry.”
Shares in Westcon-Comstor’s parent company, Datatec, surged 10% earlier this month as it revealed its half-year profit would double.
Globally, cybersecurity for the first time generated more than half of Westcon-Comstor’s gross sales in its latest year.
“In the UK, 80% of our business was driven by voice, but it was a declining market and we looked at it and said, ‘well, we need to de-invest and re-invest in cyber,” Nolan said.
“The business has been flying for the last five years – it’s well ahead of its plans.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
