Exclusive Networks has grown quickly in the past decade, but, as Rob Tomlin, managing director for UK and Ireland, explains, the company has plans to grow even faster as it capitalises on the opportunities in the marketplace.
It has been a busy 12 months for Rob Tomlin since he stepped into the position of managing director, UK & Ireland at Exclusive Networks.
But while it has been hectic, it is a journey that he has enjoyed as he has taken up his role at a time of fast growth in the market and the company.
“Frankly, it’s been awesome,” Rob says. “Before I joined Exclusive, I knew it was a great company and had built up a good reputation in the cybersecurity market. But now I’m involved with the company, I know just how good it is.”
Exclusive experience
For Rob, the past year has been energising as he has been welcomed into the company and seen its potential for future growth. “For the last decade, Exclusive has quietly gone about its business of building what is now a leader in cyber security and data security for the UK and EMEA markets,” he explains.
“Then I reflect on why I’ve enjoyed this past year so much and why the company has been so successful, we have this saying internally, which is we give customers the Exclusive experience and I have had that in my first year. What is that? We put the customer first at all times. And the customer is not just the partner, it’s the vendor, it’s your colleague. We want to be trusted throughout the organisation.
“In the world of security, if you’re not trusted, then you’ve got a problem. But we want to be a trusted adviser to our vendors and our partners. And internally, we want all our colleagues to be trustworthy and trusted because we’re nearly 300 teammates in the UK. We need that collaboration, we want to be innovative and disrupt the market, disrupt the norm with what we are doing. When someone says we can’t do that, I say, ‘absolutely we can’, because there should never be a no.
“We’re also team cultured. They’ve been so welcoming to me. I’m the boss, so you’d hope they would welcome me, but everything we do is about the team. All of that has been a breath of fresh air. It’s exactly what I needed. It’s massively energised me.
“The company is also on a growth trajectory and with the potential of the cybersecurity market and where it’s going there is very little that stops us doubling the size of the business again in the next three to five years. It’s very exciting.”
NetApp agreement
Part of Exclusive Networks’ growth strategy has recently included signing a distributor agreement with NetApp to provide highly secure, data-centric solutions to channel partners in the UK and Ireland. Together, Exclusive Networks and NetApp will enable partners to better protect their customers’ businesses, enhance cybersecurity and deliver secure and resilient digital infrastructure.
NetApp’s data infrastructure solutions are a complementary addition to Exclusive Networks’ cybersecurity portfolio. NetApp is now its primary data infrastructure vendor for the UK and Ireland to provide the most secure data infrastructure on the planet.
“We signed an agreement to distribute NetApp, a tier one vendor and similar to other leading vendors we have in our portfolio,” he says.
“It’s simple. No data, no business. If you can’t get to your data, you can’t operate in many businesses today. If you haven’t secured it well, if you haven’t backed it up well, you haven’t got access to it, your business doesn’t exist. We’ve seen that with very large logistics companies that have not been able to ship things because they’ve got no access to their data.”
The addition of NetApp is just the latest key vendor Exclusive Networks has a relationship with. “We’ve been growing our key vendors very nicely,” says Rob. “But we’ve also been growing very fast in the world of AI and data security. AI is causing fantastic growth in the IT ecosystem, the challenge is if you want to do security well and you want to secure all the data you’re creating, you need to have very well-structured data.”
Keeping ahead
Of course, with cybersecurity, the key is to stay one step ahead of the myriad bad actors that are out there. Rob explains that Exclusive Networks has a global vendor team that works with larger vendors to influence them to make themselves relevant to partners and end user customers. “But they are also looking for the next unicorn vendors that you’ve never heard of,” he adds. “There are so many vendors that are coming out of Silicon Valley, Israel, Australia that are AI data vendors, or automation vendors, or security vendors. We’re looking for new vendors that complement the platform vendors. Then there are lots of plugin vendors that address what’s needed with those other vendors.
“It’s an ecosystem. Our job is to review the ecosystem constantly and bring in those vendors that enable our customers to help keep the bad guys out and to help their customers remain agile to those threats.”
Training is also an important aspect and Exclusive Networks is a global training provider. “We do something like 30,000 training sessions a year,” says Rob. “Nearly all the vendors that we distribute, we’re an authorised training centre for, which gives people that sense of comfort when they’re dealing with us. But we train their customers as well.”
Disrupting the marketplace
Looking forward to 2025, Rob is keen for Exclusive Networks to continue to disrupt the marketplace. “We just do things differently,” he says. “We are so agile compared to our US-headquartered distributors. We make decisions on credit, on payment terms, on risk in minutes, not weeks. We hire ahead of the trends. If we see an opportunity, we decide to make investments. We invest money in marketing, which creates pull through for our vendors and customers.
“One specific thing is payment. One of the biggest challenges right now is getting a CFO to sign off an investment. They know they need to make it, but they don’t want to spend their cash. They also don’t want to use leasing because they see leasing can cost them more. But our Exclusive payment solutions are fabulous. We’re able to enable a customer to commit to a five-year deal with a vendor or a three-year deal, secure that beneficial pricing, but pay monthly, quarterly, annually. I’ve been in this game for 25 years and distributors don’t do that.
“We just do things differently and it goes back to the initial point I made: we’re trying to do things in the Exclusive way, and that Exclusive way has been quiet for the last decade. But we are being more vocal now to help our partners grow at a faster pace in this fast-growth market.”
