Running Ignition is “fun”, its CEO and CSO have proclaimed as they opened up on their decision to stay on and lead the cybersecurity VAD towards a new €500m-revenue goal.
Peter Ledger and Sean Remnant had the option of exiting the Farnborough-based outfit last July, four years after its sale to Exclusive Networks.
Instead, the duo chose to stay on past their earnout commitments (alongside fellow shareholder and UK& Country Manager Dave Risk), and are now looking to propel the CrowdStrike, SailPoint, BeyondTrust and Abnormal ally’s revenues to €500m.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, they also batted off fresh fears that AI will “kill” cyber, and revealed which emerging cyber opportunity they’re targeting next.
‘You might ask, what’s the difference?’
Ignition saw revenues rise by around 30% in 2025 to hit €282m, with the UK generating around €100m of the total.
Maintaining that growth rate will enable the pan-EMEA outfit to hit its new €500m target by the end of 2028, CEO Ledger said.
He characterised its newly private, Paris-headquartered parent as a “big brother” that can occasionally smooth its path in tricky markets.
“You might ask, what’s the difference between us and Exclusive?” Ledger said.
“Our role is to help vendors scale up and go to market, recruit partners, build businesses in multiple geos, and have that agility of still knowing how to work with not just start-ups but vendors who are trying to navigate a two-tier model.
“Exclusive are the scale-out partner. They have some of the bigger brands they’ve been working with for years. That’s how it sits together.
“On the whole, we’re separate entities. We run our own P&L, and in some places where it makes sense, like for example the Middle East – where you’d much rather have your big brother’s nous and experience – we’ll run as a business unit on their platform.”
Today, Ignition serves around 2,500 partners across the UK, Northern Europe, DACH, Southern Europe and the Middle East. Its headcount stands at 180.
The VAD is banking on a mix of expansion with existing vendors, geo expansion and M&A to underpin the next phase of growth.
“We’ve been through our earn outs. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t fun and we weren’t able to be ourselves,” Ledger said.
“We’re trying to build out from something that was a startup, to something that was in an earn out, to now really building the business to the next level.
“We’ve got a group management structure we’re building out and kind of mimicking what Exclusive was 10-15 years ago.”
“I’ve been in the industry for 32 years now, and I’ve never seen a rate of change like it,” Chief Strategy Officer Remnant said of his decision to stay on.
“It’s fascinating and exciting to be part of. It’s still good fun.”
“Sean has a good eye”
Ranking 21st in Oxygen’s 50 Must-Know Distributors and Marketplaces 2025, Ignition initially “hung its hat” on identity and endpoint, according to Ledger.
“This was partly down to Sean, because he has a good eye for the market,” he explained.
“We decided to go for those markets, and fortunately we’ve hit where we are today and see a huge amount of potential growth beyond this.”
Identity is roughly half of its business, with Ledger describing the early yards made here as “quite hard work”.
“We signed a lot of these [identity] vendors seven or eight years ago and they were used to working with the Big Four. Now you’re seeing Palo acquiring CyberArk, which makes identity even more mainstream to the security channel.”
Ignition is now aiming to repeat the trick in the realm of AI security, Remnant revealed.
“In the same way we demystified and simplified identity for the mainstream channel, that’s what we’re going to be doing with AI,” he explained.
“We’re going to make it more accessible, so [partners] can actually understand it and sell around it.
“We’re looking at the data security space, because we think that’s key to enabling AI. We’ve seen those two technology areas swap places from last year to this year, as people recognise they need to get their data in the right position to leverage AI.
“AI poses a huge opportunity, but our key position in the channel is around education.
“We need to put AI-based technology in the hands of our ultimate customers to help them defend their environments; help them stop data leakage with personal assistants like ChatGPT and Copilot, and help them control agentic AI – because there’s going to be an explosion and I don’t think people really realise what that increase in attack surface is going to mean. Identity plays a huge part in that.
“And then there’s the AI infrastructure itself, which needs protecting and that we need to check falls within compliance and governance.”
“It’ll flush out”
Anthropic’s launch of Claude Code Security last week stoked fears that AI could “kill” cyber, with CrowdStrike, Okta and Zscaler all registering hefty share slides in the wake of the announcement.
Are those fears justified?
“This just reiterates the need for education in the channel and that the markets probably don’t fully understand the intricacies,” Remnant responded.
“They’ve released a solution which in my mind is code analysis, which has been around for ages – but they’re leveraging AI to do that, like all the other security solutions. I think probably the market probably doesn’t understand and has misinterpreted it.
“I think that’ll flush out.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
