PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
The CEO of data protection and recovery specialist Tectrade talks about the fight against Zero Day attacks and valuing long-term career developments…
What was your route to becoming Tectrade’s CEO?
I Joined Tectrade as employee number two in 1999 and since then I have worked my way up through almost all the different areas of the business.
I started as a technical consultant, but the first major milestone came in 2001 as I created and headed our first pre-sales team. This was with the focus of leading our customer engagement with solutions as opposed to products.
In 2007, as technical director, I built one of the first backup-as-a-service propositions globally with IBM Spectrum Protect, which has grown into a world-leading multi-million-pound business. In 2011, I moved from CTO to COO to take on responsibility for the commercial operations of the business alongside technical delivery.
Finally, In 2015 I became CEO. In that time, the company’s revenue has tripled, we have expanded into the US, and have significantly increased the profitability of the business with robust business processes.
What type of companies do you work with?
We work with a wide range of companies, chief among them being IBM, which we have worked with for almost 30 years. Our breadth of skills has positioned us as a market-leading IBM Platinum Partner for Data Protection, Storage, Aspera and Power Servers.
In addition, Tectrade is a Gold Partner of Dell EMC, a Netapp Gold Partner and a Microsoft Cloud Platform Partner, and we also partner with HPE to enable big data and analytics workloads for our clients.
What channel projects are Tectrade working on at the moment?
As a provider of Zero Day Recovery-as-a-service, we use the world’s top people and industry-leading technologies to provide the very best in data protection and recovery. That includes our array of partners in the channel.
If you could change/improve one thing about the tech industry, what would it be?
For more value to be placed on long-term career development and the recognition that success does not happen overnight. Rome wasn’t built in a day!
What’s the most disruptive thing in data protection right now?
Zero Day Recovery or ZDR. We see that our proposition is changing the perception of how important data protection is. The last line of defence has never been more critical.
Another disruptive thing is Tectrade’s approach of placing policy at the centre of creating the right solution for business needs. When this is combined with our advanced service catalogue, we are able to ensure our customers have absolute confidence of recovering their data in the event of a catastrophic attack or business outage.
Tectrade has seen a lot of growth recently. What’s next for the business?
We have invested heavily in our leadership team; our two recent recruits – Marie Clutterbuck as CMO and Lee Woods as head of managed services – talk to our future.
Marie will help us be clearer on our value proposition by addressing real-world customer challenges into sectors where Tectrade has deep expertise, while Lee is tasked with improving our customer experience alongside delivering new industry-leading services to meet our customer’s increasingly complex needs.
PCR’s Sector Spotlight on Security – in association with BullGuard – is running throughout October – click here for more articles.
Like this content? Sign up for the free PCR Daily Digest email service to get the latest tech news straight to your inbox. You can also follow PCR on Twitter and Facebook.
