Trustmarque is developing nearshore and offshore capabilities as it looks to accelerate services growth, its COO Stuart Daley has revealed.
Having spun out of Capita in a £111m deal in 2022, the £570m-revenue Microsoft and Cisco partner is striving to move beyond its VAR roots and compete more with large SIs.
To boost this mission, Trustmarque is building a nearshore presence in South Africa and wants to start developing some of its intellectual property (IP) in India, Daley told IT Channel Oxygen.
He is one of three top Trustmarque execs to join from SI NTT Data since the start of 2023, alongside CEO Simon Williams and Head of Public Sector Chris Jones.
“Chris, Simon and I come from businesses that have 1,500 or 2,000 services pros in the UK, plus reach across the globe of 15,000,” he explained.
“The big thing on the services piece is where we can differentiate by building a lot of Microsoft specialisms and [offering] much more indepth services in the past. We’re looking at what is the best way of scaling up the UK business to be able to do that, appropriately looking at our nearshoring and offshoring strategy to add to that.”
South African ‘augmentation’
South Africa is an increasingly popular nearshoring destination for UK IT services firms, with Ultima recently joining the likes of Advania and Computacenter in making big investments in the country.
Trustmarque is on course to have 20-plus heads in South Africa by the end of next year, with the goal being to “augment” what its UK staff already offer.
“As a business, we’ve not really had the use of offshore or nearshore centres. We want to do it sympathetically, rather than a kind of big-bang, outsource-everything, approach,” Daley said.
“We’re not looking to necessarily cut jobs in the UK. It’s more as we grow, we’ll look to a model where we go overseas first to expand. This means we can invest in the UK team and actually build to do more high-powered roles.”
Separately, Trustmarque is also looking at building some next-generation IP in India, in conjunction with Orion Innovation, a sister company that is owned by PE backer One Equity Partners. This would relate to recent software asset management acquisition Livingstone.
“Orion has got 6,000 people across the globe and 2,000 in India. By taking advantage of that broader footprint we can develop a solution more competitively,” Daley said.
Self-funding services
According to recently filed accounts, Trustmarque parent Project Oak Topco Ltd saw its invoiced revenue hit £570m in calendar 2023.
On Canalys Founder Steve Brazier’s pessimistic keynote last month, Daley said “a degree of it resonates”. Trustmarque grew revenue “significantly” in the first half of 2024, with the second half so far going “okay”, he said.
“There is some truth to it – it’s a tough market. It’s a competitive market, and there is a degree of grabbing marketshare,” Daley said.
“A lot of what we want to do is around optimisation. Freeing up expenditure elsewhere is a very powerful play and a lot of our services are effectively self-funding for customers.”
As for Microsoft’s big upcoming fee changes for LSPs, Daley echoed comments from Bytes Technology Group (see here) and Softcat’s CEOs (see here) by claiming the changes will be net neutral.
“With the work we’ve been doing in terms of firstly anticipating and secondly mitigating it, we’re pretty confident [it won’t] have any effect on us. It just brings forward what we would have been wanting to do anyway,” he said.
Moving Trustmarque from a VAR to more of a services model is not without its challenges, Daley conceded.
“Taking a business whose mindset has just been ‘channel, channel, channel’, and ‘product, product, product’ – that takes some time to either bring people in who have that background or train people to change the way they sell.
“Hence with the sales transformation, although we started some of it this year, [it’s about] how we get it much bigger to get it ready for next year,” he concluded.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
