Trustmarque CEO outlines ambitions after Ultima merger

 It’s been a couple of weeks since Trustmarque and Ultima came together, but already the business has sealed its first cross-selling deal and its boss has outlined ambitions to keep the momentum going as the two businesses continue with their integration.

The merger of the two channel players was sealed at the start of the month, with the businesses coming together to create an operation that has ambitions to get to £1bn in gross invoiced income in the next few years.

Simon Williams is heading the combined operation as the Group’s CEO and is keen to talk about the opportunities that the group has identified for the organisation.

The business has chosen a mixture of Trustmarque and Ultima executives to lead the group, with Williams saying: “We have picked the best people ...we want diversity of thinking.”

He said that it’s not just the management team viewing the merger as an opportunity, with the private equity backers that have been working with the business also being positive about the future.

“Both equity houses have said we’re backing this venture, so [neither said], ‘Thank you very much, my cycles over, I’m going on’, they both see the benefit of the merged value,” he said.

The business has a strong background in products and services, but both Trustmarque and Ultima had developed their own IP, which bolsters the position of the group.

The firm is working to three-year business plans, but the majority of the first 12 months will be around business integration.

“We’ve got a year to complete the people, the systems, the processes – all this kind of stuff. So, a year, maybe a little bit longer by the long tail of the systems, but we really are focusing on that,” said Williams.

“We’re focusing on cross sell. We’ve already had our first cross sell, which is fantastic and is testament to the work the team are doing to merge, integrate, talk to each other, build one team, one sales function.”

Those cross-selling opportunities will increase as that integration continues, and the start will be to look at the potential across the current customer base.

“There’s going to be a big focus on building more strategic, longer term, multi-line business, ARR, managed services-based relationships with our larger customers. There’s a real strategic focus on being more strategic to our customers,” said Williams.

He said the firm would be looking at the customer base and identifying those that it could work closely with, add value to and become a trusted adviser “on speed-dial” handling numerous services for those users.

The firm has solid relationships with several vendors – including Microsoft, Cisco, IBM and Citrix – and will be looking to work closely with those suppliers.

“We’re in the top 10 for most of our big vendors and, now being combined, we’re maybe [in the] top three. I don’t want that to just be transactional, I want that to be, ‘We’re more important to you. You’re more important to us.’ Same conversation with customers, same conversation with the partners. I want us to be important. I want them to be brought to us. And I want to build on partnership, on reciprocal relationships,” he said.

In terms of where the business is going, there are a few big bets the executive team is taking, and Williams expects those to deliver the growth that will help it hit its ambitious targets.

“Strategically, we’ve got some big bets. Cyber is one of our big bets and our cyber business will grow somewhere between 80 and 90% this year,” he said, adding that the group has experts with the ability to serve enterprise and public sector clients, as well as invest in capabilities around key vendors, including Microsoft. “There’s a breadth of capabilities around cyber, which I think is fantastic and differentiates as the market.”

The next areas to develop are its managed services propositions, and its scale and use of AI to automate more functions to be able to provide more customers with a wider range of options.

“We’ve got the basic managed services around tokenisation, then we’ve got the more advanced managed services – single line of business – where we’ll have a service desk and offer support on there,” said Williams.

“Then we’ve got full outsourcing managed services, which is all about scale. The more people you put into managed service, the better. We can invest in automation and service desk using AI to do more predictive analytics around the managed services, automatic triage and so on.

“We’ve got a big book of business, so we need to maintain that and choose more innovation around that,” he said, adding that the group needed to continue to offer innovation to stand out from rival offerings.

A third area is around network capability, with the group able to lean on its expertise and relationships with the likes of Cisco, Aruba Juniper and Gamma. The business has seen decent growth in the enterprise connectivity operation, and the plan is to step that up in 2026 and beyond.

The final area is around optimisation and using its own IP tools to help users maximise their software assets and keep on top of their licences. Trustmarque picked up software asset management player Livingstone in 2023 and has been able to take a leading position in that market.

“People are moving away from software asset management and license positioning, and they’re moving towards more consumption, cloud and SaaS models. Moving into that area, we are the leading partner in that, according to Gartner. We’ve got compliance and an AI tool to ingest all their contracts,” said Williams. “We can manage that software spend and manage it as an asset, whether it’s through cloud or through software, whether it’s on-premise [or not], so that optimisation is a critical part of our future.”

The combined business is still counting its existence in days and weeks, but the strategy for the first few years have been set out and Williams is targeted on delivering on the vision.

“We’ve got to integrate, so we haven’t set a crazy target for next year because there will be disruption – we’ve got to put in new systems, new process, new ways of working,” he added. “But we have a very clear growth target for next year and the year after, and so on. We’ve done three years, which I think is achievable.

“From a gross income perspective as a metric, we should beat the billion. And at an EBITDA level, we are double-digit growth a year, going for three years. We’ve got such opportunities.”