Trustmarque and Dell Technologies: delivering for customers
IT solutions provider Trustmarque is laser-focused on customers, as Andrew Downes, Head of Strategic Partnerships, explains. “We provide customer-centric IT solutions which enable our customers to run their businesses more efficiently and give them a competitive edge in whatever marketplace that they happen to work in. We have six key go-to markets, really, namely cloud and data center, modern workplace IT, asset management, security, RPA and data and analytics.” The company has a strong heritage serving public sector customers, but the corporate side of the business is growing fast. “One of the things that stands us apart from our competition is the depth of technical knowledge that we have. We offer professional and managed services alongside the IT hardware and software that we provide to our customers. We really like to think of ourselves as an extension of our customers’ IT departments.”
As a 20-year veteran of the industry, Downes has seen plenty of innovation. “The rate of change is phenomenal. I think it's actually one of the reasons that people get involved in the business in the first place. In my time, the biggest accelerant for that change that we've seen has been around the adoption of cloud technologies.” He emphasises that it isn’t enough for IT solution providers to merely keep up with the rate of change. “You need to stay ahead of it so that you’re best placed to advise your customers and guide them through new technologies as they come to market. What we're seeing further down the line is the adoption of AI and RPA technologies, which are promising to deliver huge efficiency gains, hence why we’ve expanded our capabilities in that area.”
Trustmarque is a trusted partner of Dell Technologies, holding Titanium partner status within Dell’s partner programme. “We're one of the most accredited partners in the UK, with a specialism in unstructured data storage and next-gen cloud elastic storage,” says Downes. “We were the first Dell partner in the UK to sell both Isilon and the object storage platform ECS - with us being the only partner accredited in the UK to deploy ECS.” As a key strategic partner, Downes emphasises that Dell is a keystone vendor with which Trustmarque collaborates closely. “We're working to deliver the best possible outcome for our customers, so we need to be working together to draw on the technical knowledge within the vendor themselves. Needless to say 2020 has thrown up some unique challenges such as massive supply chain disruption. So close communication with the vendor from that perspective was also absolutely key to ensure that project delivery and timescales were unaffected or adjusted accordingly.”
Downes reiterates that the future heralds an acceleration in its customers’ digital transformation strategies, not least due to the events of 2020. “A great example of that has been in some of our healthcare customers, where we've seen cloud adoption like we've never seen before.” Also coming down the line are new and transformative technologies, such as the rollout of 5G. “We're also going to have a more disparate workforce than we've ever seen, which throws up its own security challenges,” says Downes. “That’s why we're working with Dell to facilitate this new working environment as part of their Workplace Redefined initiative.”
