Distributor Q&A with John Rustage, e92plus
In association with e92plus
E92plus opened an Irish office in 2024 and currently employs 65 people. In this conversation country manager John Rustage talks about his highlights of 2024 and trends of 2025.
What was your highlight of 2024?
Establishing our office in Ireland was an essential move – e92plus had been building strong partnerships with the channel community for many years, but it was essential we had a local presence. Since that important step, it’s enabled us to get much closer to our VAR and MSP partners, running local events and activities, and helping them leverage our expertise and services as the demand for cyber security continues to grow above the typical IT market rates.
How has your business changed and adapted over the last couple of years?
The biggest change we’ve seen in the past few years is the convergence of the MSP and VAR models – services represent a significant opportunity for increased margins, as well as long term, loyal relationships with customers in providing a more complete offering rather than a product. It’s also followed the drive within many customers for a more flexible, OpEx model on billing and consumption as businesses become more flexible around how they invest in IT and SaaS.
Our experience of working with all types of partners, and having an established MSP billing and management platform, has helped many VARs make that move, and leverage our services, along with those from vendors as they evolve their business model. We’ve also invested in our partner enablement services, as cybersecurity expertise and knowledge is increasingly important.
It’s a challenge for partners to cover the entire threat landscape, and have technical resources capable of delivering every solution. Our training services for commercial teams, as well as technical ones, have seen a huge uptake, along with the use of our technical services teams for more assessments and consultancies as partners look for new ways to help customers understand their posture, potential vulnerabilities, and add value through intelligence and insights as part of the sales process and prospect engagement.
How do you think 2025 will shape up for the channel in terms of threats and opportunities?
The opportunities for cyber security are significant and growing, and appearing in our news headlines more than ever – it’s clear for businesses that their cybersecurity strategy is essential, and in particular their incident response plan. For partners, the advice and guidance they can provide can be a strong differential, becoming a trusted advisor beyond just an IT supplier. This can be around the right solutions, managed services, or even just creating an effective plan, employee training program or understanding their compliance obligations around legislation like NIS2.
However, 2025 sees partners in the spotlight like never before. This is twofold – the legal obligations for MSPs to be secure and robust themselves is increasing, and many partners will need to review their own posture. This is given increasing importance as cyber criminals have identified MSPs as a prime target, given the potential access they could offer to tens, hundreds or thousands of customers and devices through their privileged access and RMM tools. We’ve seen those attacks on the IT partner ecosystem and supply chain ramp up, and it’s not just restricted to the largest VARs and MSPs.
Have you made any vendor signings in the last year?
We’ve launched some very exciting partnerships in the last year, the highlights being CyberSmart (especially around how their platform helps partners work with their customers on NIS2 compliance), Tanium (which provides real-time visibility and control across all endpoints – particularly valuable for organisations managing the transition from Windows 10 to 11, helping ensure a secure, efficient, and compliant upgrade), and ThreatLocker (with their unique approach to zero trust at the endpoint).
What do you think are the biggest trends impacting distribution?
Distribution is frequently challenged to adapt and evolve, but recent years have seen a move towards helping partners reduce costs and administration through automation. Our partner portal helps partners do that, but we’ve seen an even greater demand and response to our increased investment in our services and partners tool – such as our Cybersecurity Wheel, Cyber Essentials Gap Analysis, and assessments to help partners add real value to their customers with unique intelligence and analysis.
With the competing demands on IT resources from more advanced threat actors, greater compliance obligations, and rapid deployment of AI tools without applying the necessary security controls in advance, IT teams are struggling to stay ahead, and that’s where the channel comes in – and especially distribution. The supporting resources and expertise we can bring at scale is fundamental to helping our partners grow profitably, and take advantage of every opportunity.
What was your biggest growth area in 2024, and what do you see it being this year?
We’re dedicated to cyber security, and it’s a fantastic market. VARs and MSPs of all types are being asked by customers about to stay secure. Within cyber security, the opportunity to build out managed services in a low risk way is driving a lot of conversations, as our partners are leveraging our technical services team and experience without having to invest themselves. Compliance is also a major growth area, as NIS2 has arrived but a lot of businesses are simply not ready, struggling with the requirements, and especially the difficulties around securing their supply chain and even just covering some of basics around vulnerability remediation and securing legacy infrastructure.
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